Gasp! After a bit of research it appears that someone has forked the ClojureScript compiler to build a compiler from Clojure to Gambit Scheme:
https://github.com/takeoutweight/clojure-scheme
Apparently the resulting executable programs runs significantly faster than when using the JVM. One of the performance problems with Clojure (on JVM) is the program startup time (typically above 1 second). This is eliminated when using Gambit which takes a few milliseconds to startup. On Mac OS X:
% time gsi -e "(exit)"
real 0m0.012s user 0m0.006s sys 0m0.005s
Marc