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American Choral
Works
Leonard BERNSTEIN (1918-1990)
Chichester Psalms (1965) [17:54] William SCHUMAN (1910-1992)
Carols of Death (1958) [9:22] Aaron COPLAND (1900-1990)
In the Beginning (1947) [16:49] Libby LARSEN (b.1950)
How it thrills us (1990) [4:24] Charles IVES (1874-1954)
Psalm 90 (1890, revised 1924) [10:26]
Choir of
King’s College Cambridge, Stephen Cleobury (director) [Michael
Pearce (treble), Peter Winn (alto), John Bowley (tenor),
Daniel Sladden (bass), Peter
Barley (organ); Rachel Masters (harp); David Corkhill (percussion) (Bernstein)]
[Ameral Gunsen (mezzo) (Copland)] [Leo Hussain (treble), Simon Williams (tenor),
Peter Barley (organ), David Corkhill, Michael Skinner, Stephen Whittaker, Nigel
Bates (percussion) (Ives)]
rec. 23-27 July 1990, Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge
Texts and Translations included EMI CLASSICS 54188 [59:58]
An
All-American programme sung by an archetypically English
choir; the juxtaposition makes for interesting results and
it is good to see the programme reissued by Arkiv, complete
with original notes and texts, though a few reservations
prevent one giving it completely unqualified praise.
Ives’s
Psalm settings, ten of them in all, were all of them initially
composed (even if later revised) in the fifteen or so years
1887 and 1902, i.e. in the years during which Ives was boy
organist in Dansbury, Connecticut, and organist at the Central
Presbyterian Church in New York City. They are works of startling
originality, works which still sound astonishingly fresh.
The setting of Psalm 67 has perhaps attracted most attention,
but this setting of Psalm 90 is pretty remarkable too. Ives
himself thought quite highly of it and he was surely right
to do so. It is structured around a series of organ chords,
and an all-pervading pedal C on the organ, and Ives’s characteristic
bi-tonality serves well to articulate the text’s prayerful
movement through lamentation to a recognition of God’s greatness.
Here Ives’s remarkable setting gets a decent performance,
best at the radiant conclusion; elsewhere it is rather on
the cool side and is not helped by a recorded sound which
seems rather light at the bottom end.
Copland’s In
the Beginning was commissioned for performance at a
1947 symposium on Music Criticism, at Harvard, and was
premiered (alongside a premiere of Hindemith’s Apparebit
repentina dies) by a choir directed by Robert Shaw
in May of that year. A significant piece of a capella writing
for mezzo soloist and choir, it is built around alternating
roles for soloist and choir in a setting of the opening
verses of Genesis (in the Authorised Version). There is
much fine choral work here, and the boy’s voices are a
joy; but I remain, after several listenings, somewhat uneasy
about the contribution of Ameral Gunson as soloist. She
sings perfectly well, but her voice is so thoroughly operatic
in quality and manner that it sets up a slightly distracting
contrast with the very different sound of the choir. In
the early parts of the work, when the soloist largely relates
the declarations of God (“And God said …”) and the choir
largely recounts the subsequent actions, the contrast perhaps
serves a purpose; but later, as the roles of soloist and
choir become less obviously separate, the contrast leads
to some moments of discomfort.
Schuman’s Carols
of Death is made up of settings of three Whitman poems
(‘The Last Invocation’, ‘The Unknown Region’ and ‘To All,
To Each’). Whitman, for all his abundant love of life,
was also a poet who often seemed “half in love with easeful
death” (to quote Keats) and his work contains many meditations
on, and addresses to, “lovely and soothing death” (this
time the words are Whitman’s). It is three of these which
Schuman sets, beautifully and inventively, with a rich
range of vocal colours and effects, but not so rich as
ever to attract attention merely to themselves rather than
to the meaning of the texts. The choir is heard at its
very best here, whether in the hushed, eerie quasi-whispering
that opens ‘The Last Invocation’, taken very slowly and
sung with wonderful control, or in the expressive fragmentations
of ‘The Unknown Region’.
The Chichester
Psalms are heard in Bernstein’s own reduced scoring
for organ, harp and percussion. It is good to hear this
somewhat more intimate version of the work, but this isn’t
an altogether successful reading of the work. The rhythms
are not as incisive or marked as they might be; it is perhaps
here in Bernstein’s composition that the ‘Englishness’ of
the performers is most striking and least satisfying. There
isn’t the bite or drive that the best performances of this
piece have; everything seems just a little tight-lipped.
There are, of course, good things, not least the work of
Michael Pearce, quite lovely and touching; the third Psalm
(its text actually combining words from Psalms 131 and
133) comes off pretty well, though even here the balance
between ‘church’ and ‘theatre’ in Bernstein’s music is
perhaps settled a little too comprehensively in favour
of the church.
Libby
Larsen’s How it thrills us was commissioned by King’s
in 1990. Such music of Larsen’s as I have heard (not a lot,
I confess) had left me with the impression of a particular
sensitivity in the setting of text. That impression is very
much confirmed by the chance to rehear this setting of an
English version of a sonnet by Rilke (though not identified
as such it is ‘Wie ergreift uns der Vogelschrei …’, no. 26
in the second part of Sonnets to Orpheus). Larsen’s
setting is a vivacious piece of work, voices interweaving
to intriguingly expressive effect and is given an assured
and committed performance. Rilke’s unconventional spirituality
somehow sits very well in the aesthetic represented by the
choir and chapel of King’s.
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