Stephen Layton has come up with a most attractive programme of
a
cappella choral pieces by twentieth century American composers.
I think it's fitting that there's a substantial focus on Samuel Barber for
he was arguably the best American writer for voices of his generation.
Agnus Dei is his own arrangement of the slow movement from his
String Quartet, which acquired even greater celebrity when he arranged it
for string orchestra. I prefer the string orchestra version to the choral
arrangement - only the strings, I think, can do the fullest possible justice
to Barber's long and often very high-lying
cantabile lines.
However, this Polyphony performance is as fine an advertisement for the
choral version as I've heard. Layton achieves an exemplary blend - the right
vocal line always seems to achieve the correct degree of prominence at just
the right moment. The climax, when it arrives, is marvellously intense.
The three short pieces that comprise
Reincarnations demonstrate
just how good Barber was at writing for the human voice. The excitement of
love is superbly conveyed by both the composer and these performers in 'Mary
Hynes'. Polyphony bring out the grief of 'Anthony O'Daly' and they're
equally successful with the gently lilting rapture of Barber's music in 'The
coolin''. Later in the programme I was very taken with
A nun takes the
veil. This is Barber's own arrangement of one of his Op. 13 songs. The
song is a fine one in its original form but this choral re-imagining works
just as well. The Emily Dickinson setting,
Let down the bars, O
death was chosen by Barber to be sung at his own funeral. It's an
eloquent piece and here it gets a very intense performance. A couple of
years ago I
reviewed a Barber disc by the excellent American choral
ensemble, Conspirare. That included several of the pieces that Stephen
Layton presents here. The Conspirare performances were very fine but these
by Polyphony are at least as good. Happily for Barber devotees, the
respective programmes complement each other so duplication of a few items is
fully justified.
The disc begins and ends with music by Randall Thompson. His
Alleluia is very familiar; indeed, it's his best known work. I
didn't know - or had forgotten - that Koussevitzky commissioned it as a
choral fanfare to mark the opening of Tanglewood in July 1940. However, as
Meurig Bowen relates in his notes, Thompson was greatly troubled by events
in wartime Europe and felt unable to supply a celebratory piece. Bowen
points out, justly, that though Thompson's idiom is conservative we can now
look back and, arguably, regard the piece as ahead of its time in that the
likes of Tavener and Lauridsen have trodden a similar path. The present
performance benefits from flawless and expertly controlled singing. Stephen
Layton builds the tension slowly and patiently to the climax. This is a
splendid performance.
Much less familiar is
Fare Well, a Walter de la Mare setting that
Thompson composed for a memorial service. The piece is as touching as it is
beautiful. The music may be conservative in idiom but, frankly, who cares?
Stephen Layton is even more expansive than is James Burton in his very fine
Hyperion disc devoted to Thompson's choral music (
review). Burton and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford
take 8:23 against Layton's 9:19. Polyphony's rapt performance is a wonderful
conclusion to the programme.
Very different from these Thompson pieces is Bernstein's
Missa
brevis. This has its origins - and again I'm indebted to Meurig Bowen's
notes - in some incidental choral music that Bernstein wrote in 1955 for
The Lark, a play about Joan of Arc. The celebrated American
conductor, Robert Shaw suggested that the music could be re-worked into a
Mass setting. However, it was not until 1988 that Bernstein got round to
following up this idea when he produced the
Missa brevis to mark
Shaw's retirement as Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and
Chorus. It's a fascinating piece, cast in six short movements - actually,
the fifth and sixth, though separate movements, form the Agnus Dei. The
scoring is for mixed chorus and there's a prominent part for a countertenor
solo, here expertly sung by David Alsopp. There's also an important
contribution from a percussion player - here Robert Millett - who plays
tubular bells, tam-tam and bongos at various times. Bernstein is tactful in
his use of percussion so that each time this resource is deployed it really
makes a difference. Stephen Layton and his choir give a committed, vibrant
performance of this work and I enjoyed it very much.
Aaron Copland's Four Motets date from the time of his studies with Nadia
Boulanger and, indeed, he wrote them as a compositional exercise for her.
They lay unpublished for a long time but are well worth hearing. The first,
Help us, O Lord is fluent and mostly gentle in nature.
Thou, O
Jehovah, abideth for ever is a forthright setting and there were times
when I wondered if Copland might have had at the back of his mind the
religious pieces written by New England composers such as William Billings.
Have mercy on us, O my Lord is expressive and features some
particularly impressive writing while the brief
Sing ye praises to our
King rounds off the set in boisterous style.
The music on this programme is consistently interesting and everything is
performed with the consummate skill that one has come to associate with
Stephen Layton and Polyphony. The sessions were spread over quite a period
of time but the recorded sound seems pretty consistent to me: the team of
producer Adrian Peacock and engineer David Hinitt have produced very
pleasing sound. Meuri
g Bowen's notes are
excellent.
John Quinn
