Do you wish you
could find more of that kind of recording which makes you feel
as if you’ve died and gone to heaven? Well, with Paul McCreesh’s
‘Road to Paradise’ you’ve come to the right place.
This CD, with DG’s clean new house style and all embracing
programme, has the look of something which might turn out to be
a little on the artificial side – ‘product’, deliberately designed
to be just different enough from the others to sell well, while
fighting labels with a good reputation for this kind of music
on their own ground. This may be true in part, and there is a
certain suspension of disbelief when it comes to the ‘lucky dip’
nature of the track listing: but when you hear the Gabrieli Consort
in the gorgeously resonant acoustic used here you almost immediately
cease to care. Even in The Netherlands where they consider themselves
world leaders, Paul McCreesh is recognised as one of the most
significant artists in the current world of early music. He is
known for his extensive study of seventeenth century music, and
is a talented cellist as well as being the interpreter and conductor
we recognise most today. McCreesh’s attitude to programming has
been well tested in the field, and there are plenty of precedents
which lead up to a CD of this nature. The John Sheppard Missa
Cantate which re-creates an entire Christmas Mass, is
just one case in point.
In
this recording Paul McCreesh has organised
the repertoire as a kind of ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress’: not in the sense that the
pieces were associated with the great
medieval pilgrim routes, but rather
as a way of tracing a soul’s journey
from life to death. ‘The Road to Paradise’
transports the listener through a landscape
of English a capella singing, and the
rich choral tradition which makes England
stand out from the rest of Europe. The
programme builds a bridge from thirteenth
century chant, through the sixteenth
to the twentieth century. After the
tolling of a bell, Thomas Tallis’s Miserere
nostri melts through your loudspeakers,
and sets the mood for the entire album.
The Tallis connects seamlessly with
John Sheppard’s Media vita in morte
sumus, described by Richard Morrison
as ‘the ‘Götterdämmerung of the Tudor
era’ and at nearly 20 minutes certainly
a dramatic tour-de-force. Robert Parsons
is a new name to me, a composer about
whom little is known, other than that
he died young, drowning in the river
Trent. On of the highlights has to be
Gustav Holst’s Nunc dimittis,
sharing a style of visionary ecstasy
with William H. Harris’s setting of
John Donne, Bring us, Oh Lord God.
John Tavrner’s ethereal Song
for Athene will always be associated
with the funeral of Diana, Princess
of Wales in 1997, and the final work,
Herbert Howell’s Take him, Earth,
for cherishing, written after the
assassination of John F. Kennedy in
1963, is given as moving a performance
as I can remember hearing.
This might all seem
to be a recipe for misery, but the sense of restrained celebration
is tangible, the joy in the voices, the music and the space in
which it is being sung all contributing to a sense of hopeful
eternity rather than earthly suffering. Monotony is swept aside
in a variety of shifting perspectives, with parts of the choir
appearing deep from within the church, others taking more soloistic
moments at closer range – always in proportion and with a sense
of appropriate scale, but teasing the ear and maintaining interest
nonetheless. Yes, the individual works are subjected to a project
in which the sum of their parts might be seen as being lesser
than the whole, but take them out of context and I defy you to
find a weak one among their number. With Paul McCreesh as a guide,
the road to paradise is a very pleasant one indeed.
Dominy Clements
