Month: June 2017

LUMINESCENCE

Canticum

Move Records MCD 558

What you see here is exactly what you get: contemporary choral music from across the world – New Zealand, Estonia, the United States, Latvia, Norway (sort-of), Sweden, and Australia.   The choir Canticum itself is new to me although it has been in existence for 21 years; in fact, this CD is a 21st birthday celebration.   With founding conductor Emily Cox, the ensemble is currently in residence at St. Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point in Brisbane and, on this showing, is a more-than-able body, even if some of the tracks on offer in Luminescence could have profited by a re-take.

Cox and her cohorts adopted the over-arching theme of light; in this instance, light generated by sources that need no heat to do their work.   This refers, I suppose, to the static nature of scores which, in themselves, have no physical energy.   Canticum’s task is to generate the luminous – sometimes, the numinous – by their efforts and, for a good deal of the time, this works.   Of the 16 tracks, three contain settings of the Maundy Thursday antiphon Ubi caritas, seven comprise the Magnificat-Antiphons of Arvo Part, another is New Zealander David Hamilton‘s version of the Ecce beatam lucem text best known for its 40-part setting by Alessandro Striggio, and Swedish composer Fredrik Sixten uses the chant Veni, veni Emmanuel in his refugee-remembering The Fleeing Child is Jesus to a text by Norwegian poet Emil Skartveit.   The remaining six works fall under the general heading of celebrations of nature, or even God-in-nature.

You can find much interest in the Ubi caritas settings which are treated handsomely by the Canticum singers, beginning with a version of that by Ola Gjeilo which owes most to the original Gregorian as well as the luminous Durufle arrangement; not many surprises in the work itself but the choir gives it a refined and fluent reading.   Paul Mealor‘s treatment was used at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton; in my case, its inclusion in that ceremony went through to the keeper.   Which was a pity because its quiet abrasiveness, well-husbanded dissonant moments in the work’s progress, display an unexpected individuality of voice.   Cox gives prominence to the motet’s inner parts at tense moments, which makes for some remarkable harmonic exposure, but Mealor succumbs to the temptation of citing the original chant en clair towards the end.   Australian-born Joseph Twist‘s treatment is slow-paced and meditative in a post-Tavener style, with moments of stasis on certain syllables – Ubi caritas et amor or congregavit.   The verses starting with Exultemus move into a more rhythmically dynamic region; even so, the singers could have attacked these pages with more ferocity.   Like the other settings, Twist’s is ternary in form and not over-adventurous harmonically, although the stretch of bitonality near the end made a pleasant surprise; a pity, then, that the work concluded so predictably.

Part’s versions of the O  Antiphons – those appearing in the Vespers services of the days leading up to Christmas Eve – are generally terse, even when he seems to be mulling over the texts.   The first, O Weisheit, is vintage Part with an orthodox texture changing at glacial pace; O Adonai seems to be for male voices only and the Canticum basses sound laudably confident; O Spross aus Isais Wurzel tests the choir’s ability at sustaining grating 2nd intervals.   In O Schlussel Davids, the body’s sopranos sound marginally ‘off’ their top notes and their line doesn’t regain its certainty until the concluding die Fessel des Todes bars.   O Morgenstern finds them in better form, although the final statement of the title could have been re-recorded with profit.   O Konig aller Volker satisfies for its firm treatment of Part’s underpinning tramping pace, while the concluding O Immanuel also suffers from top-line pitching, the series of top As not quite centred accurately; Part’s second-time through this text fares more successfully, but then, it’s less challenging.

Hamilton’s Ecce beatam lucem is written for SSAATTBB forces and its opening is a powerful and brave acclamation that more than adequately sets up a luminous choral ambience.   Parts of Canticum’s aggressive approach work very well but there are some lapses; the composer’s clever build-up of tension at the final line, Nos hinc attrahunt recta in paradisum, needs more deliberate definition and disciplined order of attack.   Like Part, Hamilton exposes his sopranos on top of low-lying textures, with the result that they sound strident on occasion, hard-pressed to do anything but get the note(s?) required.   The piece is testing of all executants but this group might be better advised to take the whole thing at a more rapid tempo – like the Kiwis do.

Sixten’s score enjoys an excellent performance here, the singers maintaining a clarity of shape and texture even when the composer puts the Gregorian line in operation simultaneously with his own setting of Startveit’s words.   The point is made without being laboured – Christ was a refugee and his status is reflected in the modern-day influx to Europe (and Australia) from the East and Africa.    Sixten is humane enough to celebrate the optimistic Gaude elements of the chant alongside the poet’s ringing appeal for the worth of charity: Open the door for suffering.    If not the high-point of the CD, this comes close to it with an appealing clarity and enthusiasm from its performers.

Cox and her choir juxtapose samples from the work of two formidable American composers.   First is Sure on this shining night, Morten Lauridsen‘s interpretation for four-part choir with piano accompaniment of James Agee’s well-known poem,   You’d have to work pretty hard to miss with this splendid composition and the Canticum give a carefully honed version with a fine timbral glow; this might not be as dramatic at its climax as many American choirs make it, but I much prefer this body’s sustained communication of hushed wonder and Delius-like shimmer in the movement of lines.

Randall Thompson‘s Choose Something Like a Star sets an early poem by Robert Frost and, like Lauridsen’s piece, asks for SATB choir with piano.   I’ve never understood its popularity, least of all for its leaden-footed pace at the start and the regularity of its syllabic heft.   Still, the group treats it with care, showing no trouble in handling its few tests and giving some body to pretty predictable sequences.   Thompson’s vocabulary sets no challenges for the listener but the poet’s approval of the composer’s treatment of his lines seems to veer towards the charitable.   I had the feeling that Christopher Wrench‘s accompaniment was leading the voices  – or rather, anticipating them – at various stages, although that could just have been enthusiasm or an understandable urge to keep the pace moving.

Stars by Eriks Esenvalds asks the singers to handle tuned glasses and Tibetan bowls;  the few performances I’ve seen have been lacking in the bowls area and only some of the choir members have been trusted to manufacture that eerie, science-fiction-suggestive sound from the glasses part-filled with water.   Some of the pitching here left me unconvinced, notably at Sara Teasdale‘s line Up the dome of heaven, and the soprano solo before the climactic stanza beginning And I know that I is inexact.

Brisbane composer Phillip Gearing employs sustained chords under a gently lyrical line to set the mood for his Only the Light which uses a text fragment from Surrealist-feminist Leonora Carrington‘s short story The Royal Summons.   This is in effect a slow-moving nocturne, highly atmospheric and pretty successfully achieved, although there seems to be some out-of-sync harmonic movement from the tenors during the work’s final clause.   Giselle Wyers has set Roethke‘s famous poem The Waking; but has she?   The text that we hear is the American poet’s I strolled across An open field that comes from Roethke’s The Lost Son and Other Poems of 1948, some years before he wrote that striking villanelle, I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   This composer also has a piano accompaniment but the work itself, lilting and benign, tends to aimless modulation – an ordinary-sounding idyll.

The CD ends with a piece written for Canticum by Keren Terpstra, who supplied both music and words.   Light refers to the Transfiguration, albeit elliptically in its two cryptic lines.   While the working-out becomes a tad ordinary at the start to the work’s second line, the composer struck gold later with her use of sonorous chord clusters in which the inner lines move downward in writing of no little complexity, testing polyphony in which the Canticum singers hold their nerve; a pity that this challenging piece ends rather tamely in a G Major resolution.

In sum, Cox and Canticum have given us an interesting miscellany including some pieces that are pretty familiar to those who have an interest in the field of contemporary choral composition and some rarities, even for the well-informed.   A more demanding editorial hand would have ironed out some problem points but the disc has considerable merit, not least for shedding light on some highly deserving writers.

J.S. BACH SONATAS FOR VIOLA DA GAMBA AND HARPSICHORD

Laura Vaughan, Elizabeth Anderson

Move Records MD 3396

Robert James Stove’s booklet notes for this all-Bach CD begin by noting that ‘it is remarkable how his sonatas for viola da gamba and keyboard remain in the shadows, at best, of most music lovers’ consciousness.’   He’s quite right, in a way: you won’t find many of us able to quote the initial themes of any movement in these three works, while our awareness of the cello suites, violin partitas and flute sonatas is theoretically profound.   I’m trying to recall when – or if – I’ve heard one of these gamba works in live performance but nothing springs to mind; cellists would be able to program them without much difficulty, but what’s the point when they’re already gifted with a mighty unaccompanied repertoire?

It’s not that we don’t have access to the instrument’s sound from local players, although I come from that generation where period instruments remained an unknown field until our post-university years.   Not that we didn’t know about Dolmetsch and  solitary standard-bearers like Landowska but their efforts were swamped by a musical administration in this country that just didn’t want to know.   If you search out these sonatas on modern CD catalogues, you’re swamped for choice – which might argue against Stove’s statement concerning their position in public consciousness.   But then, just because a work is recorded doesn’t mean that it impinges on the serious music world’s communal awareness.

Gamba expert Laura Vaughan and harpsichordist Elizabeth Anderson have produced a finely balanced recording of the sonatas, padding out their CD with a few arrangements: the two C Major Fugues BWV 952 and 953 where Vaughan takes the middle voice, and the  Trio Sonata in D minor from the set of six for organ, with the left hand part handed to the string player.   These fillers can disorient the casual listener by highlighting the middle line in each piece; probably more problematic in the little fugues where we’ve been taught to respect linear equality of timbre.   Not that this turns to irritation as the works are pretty transparent; the only ‘crowded’ polyphony in the BWV 952, where Bach ventures into minor keys at the fugue’s centre, presents no complex web to be deciphered.   In the other miniature, the gamba has more to do and, after the soprano line’s subject statement, has only about 4 bars of silence, being involved with lots of semiquaver work which necessarily attracts the ear away from whatever Anderson’s left hand is doing.   Indeed, the players might have been better advised to choose something more polyphonically taxing than these two slight keyboard scraps.

In the trio sonata, the mix works to better effect, I assume because the two upper parts are not challenged by a comparably interesting bass line, so the listener’s focus falls on the interweaving and imitation between gamba and harpsichord treble.   The first movement is taken at a rather staid Andante pace, but not significantly different to many another organ solo reading.   Vaughan indulges in a bit of adjustment, taking her line down an octave for a stretch.  The following Adagio e dolce is more  problematic because the gamba sweeps all before it; despite the player’s best intentions, the string line is just too dominant and Anderson necessarily opts for a restrained registration.   The finale works better, possibly because the string line is mobile and Vaughan’s octave displacements give the top line exposure at tricky moments.   Yet the whole work has a deft purity to it – no ornamentation bells and whistles and a firm metre throughout with just a few slight rallentandi to avoid the suggestion of automatism.

The first of the gamba sonatas, that in G Major, follows an equable path without any surprises.   Vaughan sets down her line with deliberation and Anderson maintains a benign commentary across the four movements.   I would have liked more bite from the string in parts of the first Allegro, for instance at throwaway segments like bars 90-92 or that odd unexpected syncopated sequence in bars 57-8.  But both musicians take their time with the odd movements, giving the strong melodic arabesques their full value and at all points letting the score breathe without hitching a ride on that relentless continuo homophony chugging band-wagon.

More immediately entertaining is the D Major Sonata No. 2.   Vaughan has more extended opportunities to engage with Anderson’s quirky right hand figures and the faster movements, the Allegri, present with a vitality that takes you by surprise; indeed, these four tracks sound as though the recording microphones have been positioned closer to both performers  .  .  .  although that could just be more a comment on the music itself than the work of the company’s veteran recorder/editor, Vaughan McAlley.   The first of these fast movements comes over as an excellent collaboration, the sharing of material finely judged, while the harpsichord’s acquisition of chords impresses more for its unexpectedness; not the one or two in the first half, but the chain from bars 72 to 75 which, in this context, sound as though Puyana has hit the studio.   Later, the sheer busyness of the final movement is, in context, biting and crisp, the players deftly relieving the pressure when the movement hits F sharp minor at bar 84 and Bach thins out his layers for 12 bars or so before asking his players to bring us home with bounding enthusiasm.

The three-movement G  minor Sonata opens with a marvellously economical Allegro, one of those instances in Bach’s works where the sheer manipulation of melodic cells distracts attention from the performance itself.   For one of the more engrossing tracks on the CD, these musicians traverse the pages without labouring the point, offering the gentlest of hesitations at startling moments like the out-of-nowhere 7th chord at bar 39 and shaping those two points where both instruments play the opening figure in unison, suggesting the finale to the D minor Keyboard Concerto for a brief moment.   Even better follows in the central Adagio where Vaughan and Anderson reach an interpretative high-point, the inbuilt pavane-like stateliness treated with an exemplary attention to detail but also with a communal fluency that displays a deep awareness of each other’s status at every point of the movement.   As a result, the pages, despite a double-repeat, fly past.   The second Allegro also passes agreably enough, the executants’ dovetailing as proficient as ever and Vaughan laudably exact;  I liked the bite she gave to the triple- and double-stops during the 19th bar from the end, but would have liked a similar emphasis at the F Major explosion beginning bar 44: one of the few full-bodied chords (is it the only one?) for the gamba in all three sonatas.

However, in their basic character, these performances remain consistent.  They exemplify a lightly-applied scholarship where the bar-line is not permitted to hold tyrannical sway; rather, each phrase is handled with apt consideration and the give-and-take of these amiable sonatas is honoured.   Neither Vaughan nor Anderson tries to over-dramatise the scores, but you can find plenty of tension in their products – it just won’t slap you in the face with attention-grabbing force majeure; these two are no Baroque Kath and Kim.   But they’re not effete tinkerers either and, if they stand among a large group of musicians who have recorded these gamba works, they are distinguished by a clean-edged honesty to their work.

PORTRAIT OF BOB BROWN

Michael Kieran Harvey, Emily Sheppard

Move Records MD 3415

Safe to say that few among us cognoscenti  have any thoughts but charitable ones towards one-time Greens Senator Bob Brown, the exemplar of an a ctivist politician who always stood on the side of the angels in a parliamentary ambience that was rarely anything higher than murky and usually contemptible and tawdry.  Small wonder that another Tasmanian eminence, Michael Kieran Harvey, should be involved in a musical eulogy to Brown who, though born and educated in New South Wales, has become synonymous in his public life with the island state’s environmental battles.

For his homage-of-sorts, Harvey and associate artist Emily Sheppard have prepared three works – two of them original and one a revision.   All three are of shortish duration and the CD winds up being considerably less than half the length of a ‘normal’ contemporary recording: Harvey’s title track is 11:16 minutes, Sheppard’s Aftermath for viola and voice is 9:02, and Harvey’s Homage to Liszt reworked for violin/piano duet last for 9:20 minutes.  These compositions were all performed at the musical launch of a collection of poems by medical practitioner Arjun von Caemmerer in October last year at the Conservatorium Concert Hall in Hobart.

Portrait of Bob Brown gives equal billing to violin and piano, not exactly asking for stamina, although the piece contains a few active bouts, but more an ability to negotiate smoothly a sequence of about five segments, the task made a touch more difficult as the work contains two significant pauses – changes of gear but not suggestive of discrete movements.   In fact, the score sounds like a rhapsody, the spirit taking the listener where it wills.   If you’re concerned that Harvey is proposing a kind of chamber-scale Heldenleben in which we follow Brown’s spiritual development from Oberon to Cygnet, fear not: the soundscape of this Portrait is non-specific, essentially abstract, non-alliterative and suggestive of a consistent personality rather than a psychological pilgrimage.

The work opens with strong pointillist statements from Harvey, Sheppard constructing a firm aria line under which the keyboard moves towards subterranean rumbles.   The composer’s language sounds too free and loaded with repetitions to be twelve-tone or doctrinaire but the events that transpire are structured towards an end, in this case from trills and a muffled dialogue to an increase in pace with the piano moving into aggression.   As the dynamic changes in both instruments, the pace quickens to a hurtling speed where piano and violin occasionally join in note-for-note duets, sometimes in melodic unison, at other times following each other’s path at close range.   Although clearly written out, this writing is reminiscent of Harvey’s volcanic flights of improvisation.

A pause leads to a segment suggesting the opening strophes, albeit with a pronounced menace from a two-note tattoo in the piano’s bass underlining the fragility of the violin and keyboard’s right-hand decorative elaborations positioned in a high tessitura.   A further change to briskness sees the use of hand-muted piano notes; hard to accomplish, I would have thought, given the pell-mell pace.   Another pause before a reversion to the piano’s pointillism – single notes and chords – under the violin’s exposed lyricism and the work ends with a peroration in strong statements alternating with softer joint textures, a gradual recessiveness before the final trill-laden bars for both players.   The framework, as you can see, is not over-complex although the instrumental interplay and grafting impresses for its assurance.   It leaves its interpretation open; those that want can probably find suggestions of Brown the environmental warrior, the defender of personal liberty, the intransigent proselytizer, the relentless scourge of Parliamentary hypocrisy.   But the piece doesn’t really operate on those terms; what it does suggest is a combination of restlessness and quiescence which could apply to any man but seems to suit Brown more than most of us.

Sheppard’s work is a lament in what I think is C; could be B, but it sounds more like the former.   Its language is unrelievedly minor, even when the composer/executant is playing Major 3rds.   The progress of Aftermath sounds improvised, as though Sheppard is following a pattern as far as she wants to, then moves into another emotionally similar path.   At a few points, she sings a wordless consonantial fragment above her instrumental accompaniment which itself takes on various shapes throughout the score’s length: repeated arpeggio patterns, orthodox pizzicato and the left-hand variety, two-string unisons, harmonics, trills.   Sheppard says the work came into existence at Sarah Anne Rocks on the Tasmanian west coast, ravaged by bushfire in January 2016.   Even for those of us who don’t know the area, Aftermath suggests loss and grief, and with a strangely Celtic tinge.

Harvey’s Homage to Liszt is better known – well, to me – as a duet for piano and percussion, shorter than this arrangement.   In four parts, it takes on the Hungarian composer’s ‘look’, following a varied path of emotional sympathy though a ballade, a waltz, a csardas and that form intimately associated with the composer’s popular face, a Consolation.   Harvey employs Lisztian tropes along with direct quotes and creates a formidable edifice; a small prelude suggesting Brubeck in animated mode leads into a Romantically swirling ballade before the waltz’s re-visiting of one of the Transcendental Studies, the brilliantly parodic Hungarian dance that manages to raise the spectre of Bartok as well as mirroring Liszt’s exciting rapid scale-work across the instrument’s complete range, before a token nocturne with a 12-tone melody finishes the piece, reminding us of the composer’s final experimental works where traditional harmony was dissolving.

Sheppard’s contribution matches Harvey in enthusiasm and the track is a splendid collaboration where neither performer puts a foot wrong, the many synchronous passages exciting to experience.   For all that, I can’t think what it has to do with Bob Brown, except as a an enthusiastic salute to a character that most us would probably remember, if unfairly, as something of a sobersides.

The proceeds from this CD are being donated to the Bob Brown Foundation, an organization dedicated to ‘action with a vision to protect Australia’s wild and scenic natural places of ecological and global significance.’   It’s hard to think of a cause more worthwhile in these shameful days when the Great Barrier Reef is being killed off under our eyes and Brown’s successors are ignoring any environmental danger-signs, yet wasting their energy in schoolyard squabbles.