When Sleep Comes - Evening Meditations for Voices & Saxophone
Christian Forshaw (saxophone)
Tenebrae/Nigel Short
rec. 2021, All Hallows’ Church, Gospel Oak, London
SIGNUM CLASSICS SIGCD708 [62]
This isn’t quite a concept album, and it certainly isn’t designed to make you nod off: instead it’s a series of deeply beautiful meditations, some of which are on nocturnal themes, blending voice and saxophone sensationally lovely ways to create a think of beauty.
I hadn’t come across composer and saxophonist Christian Forshaw before, but I really liked what I heard of him here, be that in his compositions, his arrangements or his playing. Tenebrae and Nigel Short are, of course, a known quantity, and a fantastic one at that. The booklet doesn’t specify how many singers they used for this recording, but it doesn’t sound like many, and a photo of what (I assume) was one of the recording sessions suggests it’s only about half a dozen.
The disc is divided between original music by Forshaw and his arrangements of music by other composers. The original music is solid, direct and very listenable-to: his setting of the In Paradisum from the service of committal sets the text with plainsong directness, while the soprano sounds like an additional member of chorus rather than an added spiritual presence. In fact, the delight of much of the disc is that it’s sometimes impossible to tell whether you’re listening to the saxophone or a soprano voice. That’s also delightfully the case in his evening chant and in his beautifully simple setting of Psalm 121. A line he sets in Renouncement gives the disc its title, though it’s the track I enjoyed least, perhaps because of its complexity: elsewhere the real appeal of the disc is its simplicity, something Forshaw restores in his silky, transluscent setting of the evening prayer Te lucis ante terminum.
In the music by other composers, it’s difficult to ignore the ghost of Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble in their famous (and famously successful) Officium of 1994. But while there are undeniable echoes to and fro, Tenebrae and Forshaw put their own mark on what they do. Gibbon’s famous Drop, drop slow tears is an utterly delectable way to begin the disc. Gentle vocalises begin and end the anthem as the saxophone soars above them, and the text itself is enunciated with crystalline clarity, close up to the microphone, creating a spellbinding atmosphere of focus and concentration, behind which the saxophone spirals gently skywards. Here, and frequently elsewhere, the saxophone feels like a heavenly body connecting we humans with the divine, spiralling upwards like an angel or a dove to bring the voices of the choir closer to those of God himself. You’ll hear this effect most powerfully in the earliest track on the disc, Hildegard of Bingen’s O vos imitatores, but it happens again and again. In Tallis’ O Nata Lux the saxophone plays a very minor role in the text-setting, but adds palpable colour, and there is a gentle shading of beauty to the great hymn Abide with me.
There are several tracks on this disc, such as in Tallis’ Sancte Deus or Victoria’s Reproaches, where the saxophone doesn’t play at all. That at least means that Tenebrae are left along to sing with the beauteous, unadulterated transparency for which they have justifiably become world famous, but it made me wonder why they’d included those tracks when the whole point of the disc is to hear the blend with the saxophone.
That’s what you’ll come back to this disc for. This is one I think I’ll be dipping into again and again, and not just on sleepless nights.
Simon Thompson
Contents
Christian Forshaw (b. 1972)
In paradisum
Te lucis ante terminum
Psalm 121
Renouncement
Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)
Drop, drop slow tears
Hildegard von Bingen (c.1098-1179) arr. Nigel Short
O vos imitatores
Thomas Tallis (1505-1585)
Sancte Deus
O nata lux
Te lucis ante terminum
Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611)
Reproaches
Owen Park (b. 1993)
Night Prayer
Henry F. Lyte (1793-1847) & William H. Monk (1823-1889)
Abide with Me
Antoine Brumel (1460-1513)
Lamentations
