Light and Gold
Eric WHITACRE (b. 1970)
Lux Aurumque (2000) [4:15]
Five Hebrew Love Songs (1996) [10:20]
The Seal Lullaby (2007) [4:13]
A Boy and a Girl (2002) [4:34]
Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine (2001) [8:40]
Three Songs of Faith (1999) [13:12]
The Stolen Child (2008) [8:44]
Water Night (1994) [5:27]
Nox Aurumque (2009) [6:19]
Sleep (2000) [5:33]
The Eric Whitacre Singers; Laudibus; The King’s Singers; Pavão Quartet; Christopher
Glynn (piano)/Eric Whitacre
rec. August 2010, St. Silas’s Church, Kentish Town, London
DECCA 2743209 [71:16]
The first thing I ought to say about this disc is that it has been received
with rapturous acclaim elsewhere. It features in the best-seller lists. What
follows should be read with that in mind.
Reviewing recently a recital by the Dutch choir Cantatrix, I had this to say
about two of Eric Whitacre’s pieces, Lux Aurumque and Water Night:
“One lush, multi-voiced chord follows another, creating lots of atmosphere,
but repeated hearing doesn’t reveal much more than this. Neither is there
much in the way of melodic writing in either of the works given here.” Both
pieces feature in this collection, in superior performances. I have listened
to them attentively and find no reason to change my view.
The rest of the music was new to me. Five Hebrew Love Songs was originally
written for soprano, violin and piano, to words by the soprano Hila Plitmann,
who later became the composer’s wife. One can understand, then, that he refers
to the songs as “profoundly personal”. They are performed here in a later
arrangement for choir and string quartet, and a tambourine is played at one
point. There is a fair amount of single line writing, perhaps inevitable given
the work’s provenance, and the work does reveal a certain melodic gift. The
music is richly scored, sonorous and almost exclusively diatonic, making for
very easy listening indeed. It can be enjoyed at a first hearing. The words
are sung in Hebrew, but the English translation reveals them to be inconsequential,
though this is no bar to accomplished vocal music. I imagine the little Vivaldi-like
flurries from the quartet during the fourth song are a response to the mention
of snow in the text, but otherwise the music for this song, as for the others,
is of unrelieved sweetness. This impression is emphasised by the scoring,
both for quartet and choir, and I found it ultimately distasteful.
The Seal Lullaby, for choir and piano, was composed for an animated
film that never saw the light of day. The charming words, a lullaby sung by
a seal to her young, are by Kipling. About the composition of this piece the
composer writes “a simple, Disney-esque song just came gushing out of me.”
Just so. The use of silence in A Boy and a Girl is presumably a response
to the eternal silence of death as evoked in the final verse. Apart from this,
I can find nothing in the text to justify or explain the choices behind the
notes or chords of this piece.
Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine uses a wider range of choral
texture and technique than the previous pieces in this collection. This includes
a couple of passages where the writing resembles an Italian Renaissance madrigal,
and then, near the end, some pleasingly economical flying noises, diluted
by percussion once again. It’s a very entertaining piece and must be very
effective in concert, but how many times one would want to listen to it remains
to be seen. The words of Three Songs of Faith are by e. e. cummings,
so readers will understand that the faith in question is rather unorthodox.
Yet faith it is, with the third song beginning with the line “i thank you
God for most this amazing day”. (I imagine that the title of this song and
the first line ought to be identical. There is a discrepancy as printed in
the booklet, one example among many of poor proofreading.) Listeners will
be moved, no doubt, by the sentiments expressed in the words and music of
this work. I find it all, again, insufferably sweet and over-rich. Perhaps
the most ambitious piece in the collection is The Stolen Child, to
a poem by Yeats, composed for the National Youth Chorus of Great Britain and
the King’s Singers as a piece they could perform together. The composer points
out that the music for the young singers represents the innocent children,
whilst that for the King’s Singers represents those who would seduce them
and spirit them away. The piece is powerful in its way, with a particularly
haunting refrain, but the music does not evoke two opposing worlds in my mind,
and the words are difficult to hear much of the time. I don’t think everyone
will agree with everything that Charles Anthony Silvestri, who wrote the Latin
text of Nox Aurumque, writes about that piece in the booklet, and the
composer’s introduction to Sleep is a particularly strange example
of his habit of recounting incidents in his life without elucidating the music
one bit. This, the last piece on the disc, fades away at the end.
Eric Whitacre’s enthusiasm for British choirs is on record, and here, with
three of them, including one he has formed himself, the performances are simply
stunning. The recording is very glamorous: witness the piano in The Seal
Lullaby. The booklet is very comprehensive, including all the sung texts
and copious notes on the performers. The composer has written his own notes
on the music; others will be less irritated by them than I was. I counted
thirteen images of the composer. The album is dedicated, amongst others, to
“my father and mother, for a warm and sky-filled childhood.”
All this music demonstrates the composer’s remarkable ear for choral texture,
and there are many moments of near-sublime beauty. The unrelieved richness
tires me out, however, and I long for more in the way of melodic line and
real counterpoint. I’m happy to admit that this may be no more than a simple
matter of taste, and in any event Eric Whitacre’s reputation is assured, just
as Puccini’s was, in spite of Shostakovich’s observation to Benjamin Britten:
“No Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas but dreadful music!”
William Hedley
A hugely successful and widely admired disc which nonetheless does not appeal
to this reviewer at all.