The first performance of Alfred Schnittke’s Twelve Penitential
Psalms in December 1988 celebrated the thousand-year anniversary
of Russia’s Christianisation, and the work as a whole takes
Russian orthodox hymns as its musical starting point. There
is a fairly gritty feel to many aspects of this music as it
revolves around the tricky themes of original sin, but fans
of someone like Arvo Pärt will find a similar experience is
to be had with a work which always maintains a connection with
ancient tradition, and always has at least one foot in a recognisable
and often strikingly consonant tonality. As Annette Eckerle’s
booklet notes point out; Schnittke, ‘trusts the metrical structuring
power of the words’ to guide the entire work’s flow and melodic
shaping.
This is a release which, SACD option aside, comes directly into
competition with a Chandos disc, CHAN 9480, with the Danish
National Radio Choir and Stefan Parkman. Both of these are technically
excellent and musically highly powerful. The Stuttgart singers
are given a more atmospheric and resonant acoustic, which enhances
the ‘doloroso’ feel to the descending lines in the opening Adam
Weeping at the gates of Paradise and elsewhere. Both of
these recordings sound convincingly Russian enough to my ears,
but the Stuttgart ensemble sounds more traditionally ‘choral’
and is a little less challengingly direct in overall impression,
which may again have to do with the acoustic perspective. Remarkable
numbers such as My soul, why are you in a state of sin?
with its clashing close harmonies and clusters which resolve
so stunningly, are more overwhelmingly impressive with this
SWR recording, in part due to all-embracing the 5.1 surround
sound, but more particularly because the unity of colour in
the vocal ensemble is greater with the Stuttgart singers. The
female voices with the Danish NRC tend to become more prominent
as the intensity increases, and overall coherence is reduced
as a result.
Warmth of expression and passionately projected performance
can be heard throughout this recording, and something like Oh
my soul, why are you not afraid? has it all, from the weaving
lines of the opening to the dissonant extremes of a dramatic
climax, all such moments serving to create maximum contrast
with the sometimes chillingly cool cadences and consonances
which follow. Layers of dynamic texture are a feature of the
piece, with underlying hummed pedal-point base notes creating
harmonic foundations, and generating other-worldly halos of
sound such as that created in I have reflected on my life
as a monk.
Schnittke’s Twelve Penitential Psalms is one of the
choral masterpieces of the last century, and this is a recording
which conveys its full, angst-ridden glory. There is one other
recording which equals it in terms of sheer expressive weight,
and that is from the ECM label with the Swedish Radio Choir
directed by Tõnu Kaljuste. For sheer control and vocal magic,
this recording does have the measure of the Stuttgart Vokalensemble,
with cooler and less overtly ‘heart-on-sleeve’ vibrato laden
solos and an unbeatable atmosphere. The ECM misses out on the
Voices of Nature for ten female voices and vibraphone
with which this SWR disc closes. This is a work which was to
prove an early indicator of Schnittke’s later moves towards
‘strictly structured simplicity’. Lines follow each other to
build curtains and clusters of vocal sound, the piece opening
and closing on a unison note of D, the final being one octave
above the opening, the changing rise perhaps standing for the
subtle and ultimately benign evolution and change brought about
through nature’s irresistible but footprint.
This is a superbly produced and performed disc which will enhance
any choral collection, and even if you have one of its competitors
the magnificent spatial effect of the surround-sound is quite
a consideration and, certainly in this case, not to be underestimated.
All of the texts are printed in German, English and Russian
Cyrillic in the booklet. The Psalms are not light and
easy fare, but neither is the vocal writing so horrifically
avant-garde that innocent listeners should have many fears.
As a toss-up between the ECM version and this Hänssler disc
I would argue for Kaljuste’s Swedish voices for clarity, sheer
beauty of sound, moving depth of expressive colour and accuracy
of intonation, and for Marcus Creed’s for its scary directness
of communication, its more intense emotions and greater sense
of the terrors behind the texts.
Dominy Clements
SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart/Marcus Greed
[54:44] 