By now, the 12-man vocal band known as Chanticleer has sung and recorded pieces in almost every imaginable genre, a long way from the Renaissance group its founder had in mind back in the late 1970s.

But Chanticleer has managed in its career of nearly 35 years and multiple personnel changes to bring the same kind of polish and quality to everything they do, and that makes everything on their program sound like part of one central library.

Wednesday night at the Parker Playhouse, the San Francisco-based dozen brought its Love Story program to Fort Lauderdale, a collection of songs that ranges from the late Renaissance to music finished just two years ago – with encores from the worlds of jazz and glam rock to boot.

The Parker is a historic house, but acoustically it leaves something to be desired for an unamplified vocal ensemble. Although there was a general floor mic at the front of the stage, much of this music works better in a room with a little reverb, and the Playhouse has virtually none. That detracted somewhat from the performance early on, especially as the concert began with music written for the church.

The first set of three songs were settings from the Song of Songs, the first two by Sebastian de Vivanco, and the third (Nigra sum) by his Spanish contemporary, Tomas Luis de Victoria. These were lovingly and carefully sung, though the volume was a little low; what the performances had above all was smoothness of line and vocal blend.

Maurice Durufle’s Ubi caritas, which came next, was radiantly beautiful, with the group’s tender approach mirroring the old church text of godly and human love with great gentleness. Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s Epithalame, also from the Song of Songs, is less direct musically but harmonically extravagant, and its closing pages gave the relatively large Parker house an idea of what Chanticleer sounds like singing a virtual tone cluster.

For the three-song set of Renaissance French songs that came next, Chanticleer used partial forces: quartets for Claudin de Sermisy’s Tant que vivray and Clement Janequin’s Toutes les nuits, and a quintet for Claude Le Jeune’s Revoici venir du printemps. Each of the smaller ensembles sang ably, with extra-soft dynamics at the end of the Janequin, and a strong sense of joyful rhythm for the Le Jeune, a piece with an attractive, memorable melody.

The first half closed with a true rarity, the Drei Mannerchore (Op. 45) of Richard Strauss, set to poems by Friedrich Ruckert. These are wonderful pieces, full of Strauss’ signature style, with perhaps the best one being the second of the set, Traumlicht. It has a ravishingly beautiful main theme and striking harmonic changes in the middle section (Komm oft, O Stern). The Chanticleer men exhibited admirable accuracy in making those sudden changes, and they gave the song an absorbing sense of rapt serenity.

The second half was devoted to contemporary music, and opened with Not an End of Loving, a three-song cycle by the American composer Steven Sametz, written in 2010. These are very skillful, engaging settings, with the first, When I Become You, built out of a sort of nervous chatter that ends in surprise, and the last, the song that gives the cycle its title (from an 8^th-century English text), a carefully paced work with a modal motif that sets it on its way. The middle one, We Two Boys Together Clinging, from a poem by Walt Whitman, was masterful, built around a repeat of the words Two boys over some slowly moving background harmonies.

The Sametz songs were presented with thorough expertise, and the piece that followed, Eric Whitacre’s The Marriage, was performed in a way that fit its overall simplicity. But it was the next piece, British composer John Tavener’s The Village Wedding, that finally lit a fire under the respectful Parker audience and got them moving into more enthusiastic territory.

And with good reason: This was a taut, riveting reading of the work that grew in power as it progressed. Even the group’s minimalist choreography, as the singers rotated in a circle, stopping from time to time and allowing the repeated line, O Isaiah, dance for joy, for the Virgin is with child, to come from different singers, added to the beauty of the singing. And if a couple of the more elaborate melismatic moments were less persuasive than the mood they set with the drone underneath, the idea that the Greek village wedding told here is one with the original Christian birth union was abundantly clear.

The formal concert ended with four pieces from a large song cycle by American composer Stephen Paulus called The Lotus Lovers. Like the Sametz, these are well-crafted works alive to the text and the possibilities presented by a choral ensemble. In the second piece, Late Spring (the texts are 4^th-century Chinese), Paulus has fun with word-painting, making the voices swoop and fall with the words The willows bend, and in the fourth, Illusions, he makes a most effective presentation of sleeplessness with the agitated setting of the words The night is endless.

Chanticleer performed three encores, beginning with Harry Frommermann’s arrangement of Duke Ellington’s Creole Love Call, then following it with John Gordon’s take on Ellington’s Satin Doll. The Creole Love Call arrangement, written for Germany’s Comedian Harmonists, was full of Mills Brothers-style imitation trombones and trumpets, and an overall sense of goofiness that the audience loved. Satin Doll again demonstrated the exceptional creaminess of Chanticleer’s sound, one that makes it sound like one voice; the central beauties here were found in the big, rich jazz chords.

The group sent the audience home in joyful style with Freddie Mercury’s Somebody to Love, in an arrangement by Vince Peterson. Mercury was a well-trained pianist before becoming a glam-rock icon in the 1970s, and his wider-than-usual harmonic vocabulary lends itself nicely to Chanticleer’s approach. It was particularly impressive to hear the Chanticleer sopranos still able to hit the stratosphere with power and ease even after a demanding program.

***

Chanticleer returns to South Florida next year, when it performs a new program at the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale on Jan. 27, 2013. Call 954-598-9321 for more information.

Editor’s note: Here is a late orchestral review from last month. Technical difficulties prevented it from being posted until now:

South Florida Symphony (March 11, Crest Theatre, Delray Beach)

The South Florida Symphony has had something of a rocky history over the past couple years, with short funding and repeated complaints about overdue payments to its freelance personnel.

But the orchestra once known as the Key West Symphony perseveres under its director, Sebrina Maria Alfonso, and judging by a concert early last month at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach’s Old School Square, she has assembled a solid team of professionals who are able to handle an impressive range of musical challenges.

In the concert, which was the third and final program of its season, the orchestra stuffed itself onto the smallish stage of the Crest for a varied bill of Romantic and 20^th-century works, and played them well.

Pianist Jeffrey Chappell was the soloist in the Brahms Concerto No. 2 (in B-flat, Op. 83), and the half-full house at the Crest was treated to an epic solo-and-orchestra work at very close quarters. Chappell, a professor at Maryland’s Goucher College, has been making other appearances in South Florida during the season, particularly in the symphony’s chamber music series at the Arts Garage.

He is a very good pianist, with a strong, reliable technique, and he played with the confidence of a man who has learned this very difficult piece thoroughly and for whom its terrors are akin to those of the childhood monster under the bed: long conquered. If he does not play with a great sense of drama, he does at least have a sense of generosity and bigness; he was most compelling in the delicious lightness he gave to the main theme of the final movement, which tripped away beguilingly.

The principal horn player did an admirable job throughout, beginning with the exposed opening bars, and the solo cellist in the third movement took center stage with a highly emotional, intense reading of this celebrated section. Alfonso and the orchestra were good partners for Chappell, and again, the close quarters enabled the audience to hear the piece almost as a gigantic chamber work rather than a behemoth.

The group had scheduled the Fifth Symphony of South Florida’s own Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, but substituted the composer’s Fantasy for Orchestra instead to lead off the second half of the concert. Like much of her music, this is a forceful Beethovenian essay crafted with skill and care, and it makes a very effective addition to an orchestral program.

The work is in four movements, and had its premiere in Long Beach, Calif., under JoAnn Falletta in 1994. It apparently has had to wait until now for its Florida premiere, which, as its composer still lives part-time in Pompano Beach, seems something long overdue. The music was inspired by the sights and sounds of Italy’s Lombardy region, and the first movement (Fantasia) uses as its starting point the sound of church bells, which are used in an evocative, mysterious way that allows Zwilich to also write some beautiful, fat chords.

The second movement, Temporale, is a very effective piece of storm music writing, with vigorous work from the strings, and the third, Lento, offered a lovely English horn solo over pizzicato celli and basses. This movement also was reminiscent of Debussy, not just in harmonic style but also in its orchestral touches, such as when the brasses were brought in and gave the music a whole new color.

The finale, Allegro vivo, suggested by battling gulls, was virtuosic and muscular, and punctuated by orchestral punches that ended the piece in athletic fashion. It’s a piece I would like to hear again, but it struck me on this sole outing to be a work of substantial interest and craft, and unlike many of the currently fashionable contemporary pieces in the classical universe, more serious and more erudite, but never remote or insular.

It provides a good deal of difficult work for its musicians, as well as good solo moments for several instruments, and the South Florida Symphony performed it with a clear sense of engagement and commitment. Conductors looking for something along the lines of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra might consider the Zwilich Fantasy as a fresh substitute.

The concert opened with one of Antonin Dvorak’s last symphonic poems, The Noon Witch (Op. 108), an evocation of a ghastly little folk tale about the horrible things that can happen to kids who misbehave. Overall, this was a solid and clean account of the piece, with good woodwind work in the opening bars and fine string ensemble after that, which set up nice contrast with the other sections as the piece progressed.

The concert closed with the Festive Overture of Shostakovich (Op. 96). The entrance of the main theme, which is semi-modeled on Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila overture, was somewhat shaky in the cellos at first, but soon everything was right on track, and this very popular piece came off admirably.

I’m not sure how often this particular group of freelancers will be assembled for the South Florida Symphony, but the group that played the Crest on March 11 was a strong one, and future iterations will no doubt be able to add some real symphonic enjoyment to the region’s seasonal menu.

***

Violinist Lara St. John appears with the orchestra Tuesday, Nov. 20, at the Crest to play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (in D, Op. 35) on a program with the Bruckner Fourth Symphony. On Jan. 15, 2013, pianist Natasha Paremski solos in the Rachmaninov Third Concerto (in D minor, Op. 30); also on the program are Sibelius’ Pohjola’s Daughter, Richard Strauss’ Macbeth, and Debussy’s March Ecossaise. The third concert, set for April 9, 2013, features cellist Zuill Bailey in the Cello Concerto of Edward Elgar. That concert also includes the Rosamunde overture of Schubert and the Brahms Second Symphony (in D, Op. 73). For more information, call 954-522-8445 or visit www.southfloridasymphony.org.

It was hard, seeing all those instrumentalists downstage on a closed-in pit at the Kravis Center, not to think of the long-gone Florida Philharmonic.

And perhaps that ultimately was the point of the Palm Beach Symphony’s benefit concert Tuesday night at the Kravis Center, which featured a terrific reading of the Dvorak Eighth Symphony as conducted by a major international conductor, and an impressive performance of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto by an up-and-coming young pianist with serious YouTube cred.

This was a Palm Beach Symphony of 70 players, which is roughly twice the size of the core group, and Executive Director Michael Finn has said he wants to use the Orchestra at St. Luke’s model for the group next year. Its performances in the 2012-13 season will include such things as an evening of wind and string serenades, for example, and perhaps a performance of the Erwin Stein reduction of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.

But here it was, a full-size orchestra of local musicians, playing with a full-bore Romantic sound and making only a few glitches – a trumpet bobble here, an uncomfortable string stratosphere for the violins there – to speak of. And the house at the Kravis, partly populated by patrons in formal dress coming from a pre-show party and headed to a gala dinner afterward, loved it.

The concert, which was led by Jahja Ling, a Leonard Bernstein protégé who used to lead Tampa’s Florida Orchestra and now leads the San Diego Symphony, opened with the Tchaikovsky First as played by the Uzbek-born pianist Lola Astanova. She has made some serious Internet noise with her bravura etude on Rihanna’s Don’t Stop the Music, and her guiding career inspiration seems to be Vladimir Horowitz; and indeed, she began the evening, as Horowitz sometimes did, with a rich solo version of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Astanova is an attractive woman as well, and she made a striking entrance in a charcoal-gray dress with a fabric flourish at the top and stiff cutaway panels at the legs that she had to hold onto while walking onto the stage. At the keyboard, and in her previous appearance with the orchestra last season, she demonstrated a powerful, muscular approach, and a brilliant technique.

This very familiar concerto came off very well, with a plush first movement that made much of the yearning second theme and the movement’s overall breadth; it was in some ways too plush and could have used a little more energy and fire. The second movement had beautiful playing from solo flute and Astanova, who showed off her lovely singing tone. And while the contrasting fast section that follows had plenty of sparkle, it needed a touch more of the will-o-the-wisp, something lighter and more mysterious.

In the finale, Astanova gave the folk-tune main theme a good sense of joyful rhythm, and drilled those climbing octaves toward the end impressively. Ling and the orchestra were good partners throughout, especially in the very beginning, when there was some slight debate about where the tempo of the main section was going to be.

After a rapturous reception, Astanova returned to the piano for an encore she did not name, but which was the Ocean Etude (in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12) of Chopin, a piece that gave Sergei Rachmaninov almost every compositional building block he needed. And Astanova played it in huge, Rachmaninovian style, in which the sixteenth notes were rattled out like bullets and the initial note of each bar tolled like a great bronze bell.

It fits perfectly with her style, and she is a formidable and attention-getting player. One only wishes for her to add some more lightness and delicacy to her work. She has said she’s going to be focusing on French music in the months ahead, and that should add some other, pastel-like colors to her red-blooded palette.

The second half of the program contained Antonin Dvorak’s finest symphony, the No. 8 (in G, Op. 88). It’s one of Ling’s favorite pieces, and he led it with all the gusto of a salesman who loves his product. And the Palm Beach Symphony was one with him, giving him everything he wanted, and in the end showing their affection by bringing him out for one last curtain call.

Ling led the work from memory, and he guided the audience and his instrumentalists through an enlightening tour of orchestral color and effect. This work is a gift to all orchestral cellists, in that the opening pages of the first movement and the finale are devoted to beautiful melodies sounded in that section. The cellists opened the work with the kind of engaged sound you get from people who know they’re in the spotlight and they’re happy to be there.

The first movement offered listeners the template they would need to frame Ling’s entire approach to this piece, a conception that stressed the composer’s prodigious melodic facility and his first-rate ear for orchestral color, making sure that each little motif, no matter how small, was presented so that it could make maximum impact.

In some ways, the second movement was the best of all. It’s built almost completely on a rising four-note scale used as an upbeat, and it can sound loosely constructed in an indifferent performance. But Ling, and the orchestra that followed him, made sure to wring every bit of meaning and warmth out of the initial statement. In the middle, the strings played their six-note motto with volume and force, adding to its memorability but also helping to show how tightly organized the movement really is.

In the scherzo, there was plenty of old-fashioned portamento in the main theme, which gave it a 19^th-century Viennese feel, and the contrasting theme, as well as the quickstep coda, had the crystalline clarity of simple folksong. The finale’s opening theme (which I’ve always thought would make a terrific wedding processional) was faster than many versions I’ve heard, and that helped launch the movement on its way to a fiery, vivid account that saw Ling urging on the various sections to all-out effort.

Imperfections, again, were minor; what mattered was that this was a crackerjack performance from a big local orchestra, and that the audience adored it. These are veteran, expert musicians who have played here in some cases for decades, and they remain the core of the various orchestral excellences hereabouts that do so much to keep South Florida’s cultural level higher than most of its residents are generally aware.

And for all the good that it did for the cause of the Palm Beach Symphony – and no doubt it did – it also was a reminder of what we lost when we lost the Florida Philharmonic, and how vital it is for a large community like this one to have major cultural institutions through which our artistic lives, as well as our lives in general, can be immeasurably enriched.

Steel drummer Othello Molineaux has helped his instrument go global since the Trinidad native moved to Miami in 1971. The 72-year-old introduced the tuned drums -- often referred to as "steel pans," and played with mallets that strike different areas to produce specific musical notes -- to much of the world through international touring with the late jazz bass giant Jaco Pastorius.

Molineaux worked closely with Pastorius from the bassist's self-titled, Grammy-nominated 1976 debut solo album up until his 1987 death at the hands of a Wilton Manors nightclub bouncer, and vividly remembers his first impression.

“I went to see Ira Sullivan at a club called the Lion’s Share in North Miami in the early ‘70s,” he says. “Jaco was with him, and it was just incredible! But being new to the United States, I actually figured that most bass players here could play like that, which certainly proved not to be the case. And when he heard me play, the admiration was mutual.”

Pastorius also employed Molineaux on his sophomore 1981 studio release Word of Mouth and the 1983 live-in-Japan disc Invitation. The bassist even offered up the tracks from the steel drummer’s Holiday for Pans album, which Pastorius played on and produced, as the second recording on his own Warner Bros. label contract.

“We started working on ‘Holiday for Pans’ around 1978,” Molineaux says. “Jaco brought the Warner Bros. people out to see me play with my band, and got permission to produce an album for me. But when he tried to talk them into making it the second album on his contract, they refused, because it was my record even though he was playing on it. After he died, a friend of Jaco's sold the unfinished tapes to a Japanese producer, and a lot of the parts got re-recorded by other musicians. Even some of his bass lines, and it got released over there under his name, which was a horrible thing to do to his legacy.”

And to Molineaux’s, although it didn't appear to stunt his influence. Walk through a downtown South Florida area from Lake Worth to Miami Beach on a seasonal weekend and try not to hear a steel drummer now. Just don't expect those musicians to sound like the godfather of his country’s national instrument.

“There are a lot of very good players around here now,” Molineaux says, “but most of them are doing the tourist thing.”

You’ll get no campy renditions of Yellow Bird by Molineaux, who got inducted with the Sunshine Jazz Organization of Florida’s inaugural Jazz Hall of Fame class in 2010. He grew up in a musical household where his sister sang, his mother was a piano teacher and his father a violinist.

“I don't think he was very good, though,” Molineaux says, “because I grew to hate the sound of that instrument.”

A pianist from an early age, Molineaux started playing steel pans at 11. He continued his piano studies at Fatima College and Queen’s Royal College, and actually moved to the island of St. Thomas in 1967 to work as a pianist at the Virgin Islands Hilton. The studies, and experience, helped to shape his steel drum style.

“Oh, I’d say so,” he says. “It's a chromatic instrument, and the piano training helped me introduce melody to what was considered a rhythmic percussion instrument.”

Molineaux started reinforcing that theory upon his arrival in the U.S. by teaching master forums at the University of Miami, and he now teaches a handful of private students. In 1993, he released both his debut educational book Beginning Steel Drum (Warner Bros.) and a stellar debut CD, It’s About Time, on his Big World label. He’s now working on sequels to both.

“The first book was for playing the lead pan,” he says, “and the second book will focus on playing two pans. I’m also in pre-production on my second CD, which will be called ‘Wish You Were Here.’ Toots Thielemans plays harmonica on it, and I’ve orchestrated and multi-tracked six different sets of steel pans. It was the vision Jaco had for Holiday for Pans, and I'm hoping for a November release.”

Pop acts that include the group Chicago and former New York Dolls vocalist David Johansen have also employed Molineaux’s pans on their recordings. Yet many of his steel drum credits have been on releases by celebrated jazz pianists like Eliane Elias, Ahmad Jamal and Monty Alexander, and he’s also a member of the quartet led by another gifted bassist, Clearwater-based Jeff Berlin.

“I just did a run at the Blue Note in New York with Monty,” Molineaux says, “which was wonderful. And I toured Europe earlier this year with Jeff, who’s a terrific bass player and has a great band with Richard Drexler on piano and acoustic bass and Danny Gottlieb on drums.”

Molineaux has also worked extensively with another South Florida-based Pastorius pal, guitarist Randy Bernsen. The two are now part of the reverent Jaco Pastorius Big Band. Led by conductor Peter Graves, the ensemble has recruited guest stars on bass (including Victor Bailey, Jimmy Haslip, Richard Bona, Oteil Burbridge, Victor Wooten, Christian McBride and Will Lee) for the CDs Word of Mouth Revisited (2003) and The Word Is Out! (2006). A forthcoming third release will include both studio tracks and live cuts from a Japanese tour.

The steel drummer's own quartet (with pianist Silvano Monasterios, bassist Jonathan Dadurka and drummer Rodolfo Zuniga) plays once a month at Blue Jean Blues in Fort Lauderdale (with ace house drummer Danny Burger subbing for Zuniga), and it has a July 20 Jazz On the Palm date at Centennial Square in West Palm Beach.

For his debut performance at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach this Saturday, Molineaux promises some standards, some It’s About Time material, and a couple of premieres.

“We'll do one tune from ‘Wish You Were Here,’" he say. “Maybe even two.”

Somewhere, Jaco will be smiling.

See Othello Molineaux at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 14, at the Arts Garage, 180 NE First St., Delray Beach ($20-$35, 561-450-6357).

Editor’s note: Here is a late review from a concert last month. Technical difficulties prevented it from being posted until now.

By nature of the brief, intimate hold it has on the audience, a string quartet is usually less experimental than a large ensemble, needing to make sure each piece counts and has maximum impact.

In its appearance March 14 in the Duncan Theatre’s Classical Café series, the Canadian foursome known as the Afiara String Quartet offered on a program of Beethoven and Dvořák a new four-movement work, written two years ago for the group by the American composer Brett Abigaña. His Quartet No. 2, dedicated to the memory of the mother of violist David Samuel, proved to be a gentle, intensely beautiful piece full of melancholy harmonies, tender melodies and an expert sense of line.

In two of the movements, Abigaña writes the kind of tonal, emotional music based on static cells that the wider world embraced in the Gorecki Third Symphony, and in the other two, spiky but easily digestible language couched in familiar forms and a forthright cheekiness, especially in the finale, that made them richly enjoyable. The quartet also sounds influenced by English music in the modal character of some of its themes and progressions, and by Shostakovich in the finale.

But whatever his influences, Abigaña has succeeded in creating a compelling piece of music with a sound world that’s all its own and communicates admirably. It received a committed, lovely performance from the Afiaras, who gave it the kind of lushness its sublimated musical backstory seems to require.

In the opening Psalm, the spotlight was on violist Samuel, who plays a long and heartfelt solo in the keening higher registers of his instrument, on top of a barely moving chordal pattern in the two violins. He plays with a brightness of tone that helps carry the music to a peak of real power. The Berceuse that came next is more of a country dance than it is a lullaby, and the tricky rhythms of its first section were expertly handled.

The third-movement Vocalise was sort of a counterpart of the Psalm, this time with the deliberate tempo set in motion by cellist Adrian Fung, and violinist Valerie Li soaring above it with another plainsong-style effusion over a slow, placid harmonic stasis. The fiery finale (March) demonstrated the Afiara’s first-rate ensemble; most of the music goes like the wind, but the listener was able to hear all the lines with clarity and unity, and its abrupt but muscular ending won strong plaudits from the audience in the Stage West black-box theater.

The Afiara opened the concert with the Quartetto Serioso (Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95) of Beethoven. They began aggressively with a very fast opening, which set the stage for a high-energy reading of the movement that was distinguished by its tight ensemble and intense attacks on moments such as the big upward rocket for the four players in the middle. The slow movement had lovely playing from Samuel and Fung, and a well-judged sense of rapt solemnity.

The third movement had a toughness and ferocity that stood in stark contrast to the second, and in the finale, the group’s sturdiness of ensemble again came to the fore in the lickety-split coda, which ended the piece in bravura style.

The Afiaras devoted the second half to the Quartet No. 13 (in G, B. 192) of Dvořák, probably the composer’s second most-popular quartet behind the American (No. 12 in F, B. 179).

The group’s performance of the work was everything Dvořák should be: Rich with beautiful string writing, abundantly tuneful, full of color, dance and folk energy. The second movement was particularly well-done, with each of the four players (including violinist Yuri Cho) getting everything they could out of this lovely music, and making sure it communicated with a very appreciative audience.

***

The Duncan Theatre’s Classical Café series resumes next Jan. 9 with the Amernet String Quartet, based at Florida International University, who will bring along a guest pianist as yet unnamed. The prodigious young pianist Conrad Tao is next on Jan. 23, followed by the Merlin Trio, a piano trio based at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, on Feb. 27. The series concludes March 13 with the Škampa Quartet, a fine Czech string foursome making a return appearance. Call 561-868-3309 for more information or vist www.duncantheatre.org.