A cappella chorus Chanticleer
She Said / He Said

Called “the world’s reigning male chorus” by The New Yorker magazine and named “Ensemble of the Year” by Musical America in 2008, the San Francisco-based Grammy award-winning ensemble Chanticleer embarked upon its 36^th season in 2013-14, which will see it perform in twenty-three American States. A winter international tour of nine European countries will see debuts in Dublin, Moscow and St Petersburg as well as returns to Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Antwerp, Rotterdam and Bruges. Praised by the  San Francisco Chronicle for its “tonal luxuriance and crisply etched clarity,” Chanticleer is known around the world as “an orchestra of voices” for the seamless blend of its twelve male voices ranging from countertenor to bass and its original interpretations of vocal literature, from Renaissance to jazz and from gospel to venturesome new music.
Chanticleer’s twenty-four-concert 2013-14 Bay Area season opened in September with the launch at SF Jazz of a new studio album, Someone New, a collection of jazz and pop tunes by composers such as Brubeck, Jobim, Gotye, Waits, Mercury, Elbow and M83 among others, newly arranged for Chanticleer. The concert season opened with She Said/He Said, featuring music by Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, Brahms, Ravel and Barber as well as the premieres of Give Me Hunger by Stacy Garrop and Vince Peterson’s arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. A Chanticleer Christmas is in high demand during the Christmas season with performances from coast-to-coast in venues including New York’s St Ignatius Loyola, Chicago’s First Presbyterian Church, Walt Disney Concert Hall and churches and missions in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Chanticleer Christmas is broadcast annually on over three hundred affiliated public radio stations nationwide.
Two unprecedented collaborations will complete the Bay Area season. Atlantic Crossing in March, with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and the New Century Chamber Orchestra, recalled the period of electric creativity before World War I through the music of Rózsa, Bartók, Weill, Ellington and Gershwin and featured special arrangements by Clarice Assad. Concluding the season in June was Chanticleer’s first all-Russian programme, Russian Dreams, featuring music written for Russian male choruses – ranging from chant, folk songs and battle songs to secular chorales and Romantic liturgical masterpieces, all prepared by Elena Sharkova.
Since Chanticleer began releasing recordings in 1981, the group has sold well over a million copies and garnered two Grammy awards. Chanticleer’s recordings are distributed by Chanticleer Records, Naxos, Rhino Records, ArkivMusic and iTunes among others, in addition to being available on Chanticleer’s website, chanticleer.org. As well as Someone New, Chanticleer will release a live recording of She Said/He Said on its Chanticleer Live in Concert (CLIC) series.
With the help of private donations, foundations and corporate support, the ensemble involves over five thousand young people on an annual basis in its extensive education programmes. The Louis A. Botto (LAB) Choir – an extracurricular honours programme for high school and college students – is now in its fourth year, adding to the ongoing programme of in-school clinics and workshops, Chanticleer Youth Choral Festivals in the Bay Area and throughout the country, master-classes for students nationwide and the  Chanticleer in Sonoma summer workshop for adult choral singers. The Singing Life – a documentary about Chanticleer’s work with young people – was released in 2008. In 2010, Chanticleer’s education programme was recognised with the Chorus America Education Outreach Award.
Chanticleer’s long-standing commitment to commissioning and performing new works was honoured in 2008 by the inaugural Dale Warland-Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP-Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming for the 2006-07 season in which ten new works were premiered. Among the eighty composers commissioned in Chanticleer’s history are Mark Adamo, Mason Bates, Régis Campo, Chen Yi, David Conte, Shawn Crouch, Douglas J. Cuomo, Brent Michael Davids, Anthony Davis, Guido López-Gavilán, Stacy Garrop, William Hawley, Jake Heggie, Jackson Hill, Kamran Ince, Jeeyoung Kim, Tania León, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, Michael McGlynn, Peter Michaelides, John Musto, Tarik O’Regan, Roxanna Panufnik, Stephen Paulus, Shulamit Ran, Bernard Rands, Steven Sametz, Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Jan Sandström, Paul Schoenfield, Steven Stucky, John Tavener, Augusta Read Thomas and Janike Vandervelde.
Named for the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer was founded in 1978 by tenor Louis Botto, who sang in the ensemble until 1989 and served as Artistic Director until his death in 1997.
Chanticleer, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, is a current recipient of major grants from Chevron, the Dunard Fund-USA, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Grants for the Arts-San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts agency, the Bernard Osher Foundation, the Bob Ross Foundation and the Wallace Foundation. Chanticleer’s activities as a not-for-profit corporation are supported by its administrative staff and Board of Trustees.