Choral & song
CHORAL & SONG CHOICE
Brahms with character and chemistry
Anna Lucia Richter and Ammiel Bushakevitz are a delight, says Natasha Loges
Brahms
Lieder
Anna Lucia Richter (soprano), Ammiel Bushakevitz (piano)
Pentatone PTC 5186 986 58:08 mins
It takes a brave soul to release an all-Brahms song recording – Brahms himself discouraged the performance of more than a few of his songs in a concert – but Anna Lucia Richter and Ammiel Bushakevitz do such a fine job, surely even he would have approved. Mostly established favourites from both the art- and folksongs, the programme is nicely linked by harmonic and textural relationships.
The lower female voice was Brahms’s favourite vocal type, and Richter’s has a warmly sensual sound which is multidimensional without heaviness, with impressively effortless breath control. Together with Bushakevitz’s expressive, energetic and flexible piano-playing, on a bright, active instrument, they make delightful musical chemistry, jointly crafting confident, exuberant characters in compelling technicolour performances.
Bushakevitz’s playing is expressive, flexible and energetic
They take risks, too, for example with an extraordinarily, sublimely slow and sultry opening to the erotic ‘Unbewegte laue Luft’. Not all will be persuaded, but I was. The minor-key folksongs achieve heart-rending plangency, but also humour and defiance. The urgent, clattery motherdaughter dialogue ‘Liebestreu’ offers insights into both characters’ emotional worlds. The elusive ‘Geheimnis’ feels perfectly paced and dreamlike.
These musicians have a dynamic understanding of text, and find the right balance between architectural sweep, fidelity to notated details and freedom, imagination and flexibility. While they offer no repertoire discoveries, this is a fine and persuasive account, with excellent liner notes by Richter herself, and generous recorded sound.
PERFOMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
JS Bach
Cantatas, BWV 78, 96, 100, 122, 127, 130 and 180
Hannah Morrison (soprano), Marion Eckstein (alto), Georg Poplutz (tenor), Tobias Berndt, Daniel Ochoa (bass); Chorus Musicus Köln; Das Neue Orchester/Christoph Spering
DHM 19658710832 127:34 mins (2 discs)
As this selection from the 1724/25 cantata cycle proclaims, Christoph Spering is a conductor with firm opinions when it comes to JS Bach. Not for him the one-to-a-part premise. His choir musters 20 singers; and, detecting a Bachian preference for ‘bass-heavy textures’, he adds a contrabassoon to the instrumental forces – though he notes that the instrument didn’t become available to Bach until the late 1730s. Organ and harpsichord are prominent; and the concluding chorales flaunt a portentous pause at the end of each line. Perhaps he finds the current approach to the choral works overly light. Whatever the case, there are moments when it’s as if the clock has been turned back to the 1960s and the soundworld of Karl Richter as mediated through period instruments.
Cantata 78 doesn’t start well. Despite vivid imagery, the words are rather left to fend for themselves, Spering’s focus being on a somewhat all-consuming contrapuntal clarity.
But the ensuing duet for soprano and alto is spritely and light on its feet, and across all seven cantatas the solo singing is mostly beguiling, the obligato playing utterly seductive. (BWV 100, incidentally, is an interloper since it dates from a decade later.) The opening chorus of Cantata 127 is particularly sumptuous, while the rich trumpetsand-drums jubilation of Cantata 130 is thrilling, the chorale cantus firmus ringing out with clarion resolve, the busy counterpoint buzzingly alive. For those who like their Bach ‘full fat’ yet with period instruments, this cornucopia of cantata treasures might be just the ticket. Paul Riley
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Hahn • Saint-Saëns
Hahn: À la lumière; Chansons et madrigaux – selection, etc. Saint-Saëns: Des pas dans l’allée etc
Accentus/Christophe Grapperon; Eloïse Bella Kohn (piano)
Alpha Classics ALPHA 864 53:23 mins
Mention Saint-Saëns or Reynaldo Hahn and secular choral music is unlikely to spring to mind. As is clear, though, from this enchanting new collection, both composers are typically adroit. Mostly for a cappella voices, these pieces were generally written for the amateur singing societies that arose in 19th-century France, or the choral ensembles formed by enthusiasts frequenting Parisian salons. The ever-shifting, rich harmonies of the title work, Hahn’s À la lumière, are testament that writing for amateurs meant a lack neither of challenge nor musical quality (how come this has never been recorded before?).
Nonetheless, it is luxury casting to hear works that could grace many local choirs sung by Accentus under Christophe Grapperon and, a couple of minor imprecisions aside, the results are ravishing. The sustained reverie of Saint-Saëns’s ‘Calme des nuits’, with its spine-tingling anchoring of the word ‘profonde’, is mesmerisingly and daringly sustained. By contrast, swinging tankards can be sensed in the men’s vigorous romp through ‘Saltarelle’ with its youthful bluster and bravado. A less rambunctious carefree spirit pervades Hahn’s ‘Les Fourriers d’été’, a perfect foil for the deeply affecting, and aptly titled, ‘Pleurez avec moi’ (Weep with me). Piano underpins the final three Hahn songs, the aged-oak spirit of the introduction and postlude to the effulgent ‘Le jour’ reminiscent of the incomparable ‘A chloris’. Eloïse Bella Kohn deftly judges the textures, not least the glistening shimmer in ‘Aubade Athénienne’, providing a radiant conclusion to an enchanting album. Christopher Dingle
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Handel
Chandos Anthems
Florie Valiquette (soprano), Nicholas Scott (tenor);
Marguerite Louise Choir & Orchestra/Gaétan Jarry (organ)
Château deVersailles CVS072 64:33 mins
Putting aesthetics first, director-organist Gaétan Jarry creates his own period version of Handel’s Chandos Anthems. Instead of Handel’s chamber choir, Jarry has five vocalists on each part; instead of Handel’s eight-instrument band, Jarry leads 17 period players; instead of a parish church, Jarry performs at the Royal Chapel of Versailles. The result is glorious.
Jarry fundamentally rethinks the original scores, as did indeed Handel. Tasked from 1717 by the Duke of Chandos to supply anthems, Handel briskly re-arranged his earlier compositions. Addressing this material, Jarry re-imagines textures, playing the Versailles chapel’s bright acoustic like an instrument. He makes Handel’s strict counterpoint lyrical, with long phrases and enriched doubling of vocal lines. His hefty continuo section erupts suddenly at climaxes. The euphony he coaxes from solos shared by voice and instrument, and the contrasts he creates between movements – intimate versus grand; spiky versus serene; rollicking compound meter versus stately duple meter – are stunning.
Solo vocalists enrich the mix: pure-toned Florie Valiquette brings vibrant colours to her sustained passages, and tenor Nicholas Scott pivots from chorister-style to bravura execution on demand. But all of Jarry’s wizardry can’t improve the organ voluntary he chose for his solo tracks –probably not by Handel. Berta Joncus
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Haydn
Theresienmesse; Symphony No. 103, ‘Drumroll’
Mary Bevan (soprano), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (mezzo-soprano), Jeremy Budd (tenor), Sumner Thompson (baritone); Handel and Haydn Society/Harry Christophers
CORO COR 16192 74:02 mins
Haydn didn’t offer much guidance as to how he wanted the sustained drumroll that famously begins his Symphony No. 103 played: there’s no dynamic marking, and above and below the notated timpani part he wrote the words ‘solo’ and ‘intrada’. On his 1987 recording with the Concertgebouw Orchestra the evercontroversial Nikolaus Harnoncourt took this as an invitation to let the timpanist loose on a cadenza, and Harry Christophers follows suit on this new version with the Handel and Haydn Society. Yet here is the most sombre and mysterious of all Haydn’s symphonic slow introductions – it’s hard to believe he wanted it prefaced with a f lamboyant improvisation. Moreover, the introduction unexpectedly returns in its original slow tempo just before the end of the Allegro, a dramatic coup whose effectiveness depends on the reappearance of the earlier passage just as it was at the beginning, so to introduce a different timpani solo here, as Christophers does, makes no sense. The performance is otherwise decent enough, if rather under characterised and lacking in energy at times.
Fortunately, the Theresienmesse fares considerably better, and Christophers uses his long experience in handling choral forces to good advantage. His soloists respond well, too, to such memorable moments as the austere beginning of the Agnus Dei, or the Et incarnatus est in the dark key of B flat minor, with its aching dissonances, and its low repeated trumpet notes sounding like barely suppressed sobs in the passage setting the words ‘passus et sepultus’. Misha Donat
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Lusitano
Motets: Praeter rerum seriem; Emendemus in melius etc
The Marian Consort
Linn Records CKD694 68:20 mins
The Portuguese composer Vicente Lusitano is actually best known as a theorist. He not only published a treatise in 1551 but four years later got involved with a debate about the exact harmonic classification of a setting of Regina caeli – which he won. These motets come from his Liber primus epigramatum (1555).
As we have come to expect from the Marian Consort singers, their performances are well tuned, with an assured grasp of style throughout and with the sense of direction compellingly sustained. Salve Regina and Inviolata integra are particularly poised, and musically owe a good deal to their being modeled on motets by the great Renaissance master Josquin des Prez. Some of the other pieces (Aspice Domine) are harmonically rather lame, and their musical ideas are repeated a little too often. In Preater rerum the details of the imitative exchanges between voices are sometimes obscured by an over-prominent second soprano, though the brightness of the texture is nicely enhanced by the upward transposition. The booklet describes Lusitano as ‘the first published Black composer’ though its difficult to be certain, and for what its worth the only reference to his being mixed race dates from 200 years after his death. Anthony Pryer
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
El Rebelde
Gabriela Lena Frank: Cantos de Cifar y el Mar Dulce; Las Cinco Lunas de Lorca*; Cuatro Canciones Andinas; Shostakovich: Spanish Songs
Andrew Garland (baritone), *Javier Abreu (tenor), Jeremy Reger (piano)
Art Song Colorado DASP 005 68:31 mins
Composer Gabriela Lena Frank (b1972) has little time for stylistic boundaries or creative limits. A prodigious musical talent, Frank grew up with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss, and her music often explores her rich and complex cultural heritage, particularly her Latin-American identity (her mother was of Peruvian and Chinese ancestry).
This fine recording features performances of great versatility and power from tenor Andrew Garland, ably supported by Jeremy Reger’s accomplished pianism. The album opens with Frank’s substantial song cycle, Cantos de Cifar y el Mar Dulce (Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea) which sets poems by Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra recounting the adventures of the harp-playing sailor Cifar. The cycle includes a terrific variety of characters, moods and sonorities – from the shimmering heartache of ‘En La Vela de angeilito’ (At the wake of the little angel) to the playful extravagance of ‘Me Diste ioh Dios! una Hija (You gave me, oh God!, a daughter) – and demands any number of vocal styles and theatrical flourishes, all of which are delivered with total conviction by Garland.
Alongside this beguiling work comes Frank’s Cuatro Canciones Andinas – four powerful settings of Quechua poetry – and The Five Moons of Lorca which sets a text by Nilo Cruz describing the death of Lorca (and here featuring a powerful performance from tenor Javier Abreu). An expressive account of Shostakovich’s spare but characterful Spanish Songs completes the disc.
It is baffling that such a thoughtful recording should be accompanied by neither sleeve notes nor texts and translations, but this is otherwise an excellent album of depth and imagination. Kate Wakeling
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
BACKGROUND TO…
Shostakovich’s Spanish Songs
Following her involvement in the January 1955 premiere of Shostakovich’s song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, Zara Dolukhanova approached the composer with a set of folk songs from Spain. Hoping for a similarly esoteric and evocative set of pieces to perform, the Armenian mezzo-soprano was rather disappointed with what Shostakovich delivered. His take on the songs, including ‘Farewell, Granada’ and ‘Little stars’, actually represent very straightforward arrangements of the original tunes. Dolukhanova quickly tired of them, though other singers were more than happy to take them on.
The Mysterious Motet Book of 1539
Works by Arcadelt, Cadéac, Ferrariensis, Gombert, Jhan, Lupi, Phinot, Sarton and Willaert
Siglo de Oro/Patrick Allies
Delphian DCD 34284 67:14 mins
There are several reasons why this collection is called ‘mysterious’. It was published in Protestant Strasbourg but contains Catholic pieces, the items were sent from Milan Cathedral but we don’t know why, it contains 38 motets (12 recorded here) some of them unknown from other sources, and some of the composers are little known or otherwise completely unknown elsewhere ( Johannes Sarton). In short, this is precisely the kind of innovative project Patrick Allies and the Siglo de Oro like to get their teeth into.
In some ways the less complex pieces come off best. Maistre Jhan’s Pater noster is performed with balance and formal control, as is Arcadelt’s Dum complerentur with its arresting opening of high voices. The latter’s text contains one of the few dramatic events (a heavenly storm) in these liturgical pieces, but the composer makes little of it, and this rather typically sets a challenge for the performers to give shape or direction to this music. Willaert’s Laetare sancte mater on Augustine of Hippo for example, is given a lively performance, but the lower voices are not clearly articulated and the polyphony is made to roll on rather than develop with purpose or with identified and focused goals along the way.
The big surprise here is the impressive quality of the Christmas piece Haec Dies by the otherwise unknown Joahannes Sarton and which attracts a commendably persuasive and alert interpretation – just one of many rare insights on this disc. All of the tracks are premiere recordings. Anthony Pryer
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Nisi Dominus
Langa: Giesù diletto sposo; Locatelli: Sinfonia Funebre; Razzi: O Vergin Santa non m’abbandonare; O dolcezza; Vivaldi: Nisi Dominus; Sinfonia in B minor, ‘Al Santo Sepolcro’
Deborah Cachet (soprano), Eva Zaïcik (mezzo-soprano); Le Poème Harmonique/Vincent Dumestre
Alpha Classics ALPHA 724 58:31 mins
This imaginatively assembled programme has unusual features. The musical sequence is irregular and somewhat amorphous, consisting of mid- 16th-century laude and early-to-mid-18th-century solo motets and concertos/sinfonias.
The laude, by Fra Serafino Razzi, a pioneer of the genre in the second half of the 16th century, and Francisco Soto de Langa, are in the popular styles of the time, notably the villanella and canzonetta. Their spirit is captured, with a degree of instrumental licence, by some fine, resonant singing, above all by Eva Zaïcik and Deborah Cachet. Zaïcik is the foremost beneficiary of the programme. Her clear mezzo-soprano voice, with its tonal purity, tightly controlled vibrato and fluent virtuosity serve Vivaldi’s motets Invicti Bellate and Nisi Dominus very well. In both pieces she is rewardingly supported by the strings of Le Poème Harmonique under the experienced and crisply articulated direction of Vincent Dumestre. It is, though, in Vivaldi’s Sinfonia al Santo Sepolcro, RV 169, and more extensively in Locatelli’s Sinfonia Funebre that these instrumentalists can be appreciated to their full and considerable advantage.
While the relationship between all these pieces feels on occasion tenuous, their single intent, divine praise and the strengthening of faith is effectively realised by Dumestre and his stylistically accomplished équipe. Recorded sound is excellent and the booklet contains full texts with English and French translations. The Nisi Dominus, with its tenderly played viola d’amore accompaniment in the Gloria, and imaginative continuo realisation throughout, is one of the most beguiling performances that I know. Nicholas Anderson
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Psalms
Works by Attwood, Crotch, Gauntlett, Hemmings, Prendergast, Christopher Robinson, Whitlock et al
Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge/ Andrew Nethsingha
Signum Classics SIGCD721 51:48 mins
Why sing psalms when they can be said, or read? That is one of many questions addressed in the outstandingly informative booklet of this new St John’s College recording, where director of music Andrew Nethsingha’s essay is a potted masterclass in how psalms work as music, and why they matter. In performance – if that is the right word in a liturgical context – Nethsingha treats each psalm as a mini tone-poem of vocal affects, each line inflected in distinctive ways to elicit meaning and emotion from the biblical text. The 19 verses of Psalm 18, for example, are rich in local incident. The chant is Hine and Gauntlett’s, and abrupt dynamic shifts contrast the howl of nature in verses 12-15 with the divine deliverance which follows. The vowel in ‘breath’ is expressively extended, and words like ‘quaked’ and ‘shook’ have their onomatopoeic consonants sharpened.
There is a danger, of course, that too much pointing and parsing of text can sound pernickety. Nethsingha largely avoids this, and his insistence on crisp articulation pays major dividends in a feisty reading of Psalm 52, where the come-uppance of the boastful tyrant is relished by the St John’s singers.
The sessions for this disc spanned four years, and it’s a credit to Nethsingha’s mentoring of the three organ scholars featured that their accompaniments are so consistently insightful. Terry Blain
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
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