The Dale Warland Singers were a highly successful and critically acclaimed 40-person choral group of the United States. Considered the spiritual successors of famous choral groups such as the Robert Shaw Chorale, the Dale Warland Singers (conducted, as might be expected, by Dale Warland) tackled a repertoire of difficult, complex, yet beautiful polyphonic works for acappella choir, as well as a few instrumental pieces. Their repertoire consisted primarily of twentieth-century composers and arrangers, showcasing works by Arvo Part, Samuel Barber, Charles Ives, Stephen Paulus, and others, with well-known classics by the likes of Allegri, Mendelssohn, and others.
Warland and those around him attribute it all to his ear and attention to detail -- he knows what he wants to hear from his 36 singers and, to the tweaking of single breaths in a lyrical line, how to achieve it.
Warland is half-standing, half-sitting on a stool at the body of a grand piano, using the top as a podium while leading his singers through another rehearsal in a choral room at Augsburg College.
Warland's choir sounds much the same to someone sitting near the basses and sopranos as it does to someone seated near the tenors and altos, or in the middle -- a trait all choirs strive for.
The 40-voice chorus from St. Paul, Minn., on a farewell tour in its 31st and final season, has a somewhat austere sound that derives from a rigorous approach to the words, with rare cohesion on the vowels and razor-sharp enunciation of the consonants.
Warland and his choristers achieved an uncanny combination of celestial polyphony and crispness in the opening two works, Howard Hanson's A Prayer of the Middle Ages and Eric Whitacre's Lux Arumque.
Like another Minnesotan, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, the WarlandSingers bring a clarity and elegance of phrasing to the American language, heard in their performance of two Stephen Paulus settings, We Gather Together and The Old Church.
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