Conspirare is an American professional chamber choir who first
came onto my radar with their excellent recording of the requiems
by Howells and Pizzetti. They turn now to an album of music
by one of the most famous American composers of the 20th
century. One of the paradoxes of Barber is that everyone agrees
on his significance, but to the wider public he is known for
a very small number of works. Even those who know beyond the
Adagio for Strings can probably name only a few things
beyond the violin concerto. This disc reminds us that he was
a very gifted choral composer. He had an undeniable gift for
finding just the right harmonies, and his style fits a choir
very well indeed. Conspirare are just the right group to remind
us of this too. They have a lovely togetherness to their sound.
Closeness of the harmony is clearly something they have worked
on and the unity of their musical vision lends itself to interpretations
of polished beauty.
Barber’s choral style carries lots of echoes of the English
choral tradition. Listening to this disc it’s not hard
to pick up echoes of the work of Peter Warlock or Benjamin Britten,
and even more contemporary greats like Paul Spicer or Bob Chilcott.
His fundamentally tonal style is spiced up by playful harmonic
structures and moments of colourful chromaticism that give the
whole a very distinctive edge. It’s also interesting that
the poetry that he chooses to set is most often dense and complex,
full of double meanings or different interpretations that are
ripe for being exploited by the infinite possibilities of music.
Twelfth Night, for example, is a richly nuanced response
to Laurie Lee’s poem of regeneration and new birth, Barber’s
music blending a subtle element of dissonance into the texture
to match the poet’s unease about the meaning of the saviour’s
birth. To be sung on the water pits the male voices against
the female, the repetitiousness of the male line reflecting
the pattern of oars on the water while the women sing the tune,
and the two sides swap roles various times in a lovely piece
of harmonic painting. The Virgin Martyrs is scored, appropriately
enough, for female voices only, and is a mystical, slightly
strange meditation on martyrdom, the oddness of some of the
chords clashing with the elevated spiritual text. One of the
most striking songs on the disc, A stopwatch and an ordnance
map, sets Stephen Spender’s response to a violent
death in the Spanish Civil War. The often eerie choral texture
is offset by an obbligato part for timpani, made all the more
strange by the constantly changing notes of the pedal timpani,
giving the whole piece an eerie instability that is powerfully
effective.
Let down the bars, O death is an intense miniature from
the same stable as the famous Adagio for Strings and
Agnus Dei. It was actually sung at the composer’s
funeral, but in spite of its solemn text it speaks of death
as a release and does so in chords of mysterious beauty. TheAgnus
Dei itself is sung with a lovely view to the long line,
though, to my ears at least, the tuning was prone to get ever
so slightly out of sync at a few junctures. I’ve never
quite been convinced by this work in its choral arrangement
- to my mind the soprano line sounds overdone in the climax
- but they make a good enough job of it here. Reincarnations
sets a series of poems based on the Irish writer Anthony Raftery.
Mary Hynes has a tripping lightness about it, a good
echo of the poet’s affection for the most beautiful woman
in the west of Ireland, and The Coolin’ is a more
tender sort of love song. Anthony O’Daly, on the
other hand, is a bleak meditation on the finality of loss, the
basses holding the same note like a tolling bell for 40 measures
while the upper voices seem to circle around one another in
disbelief at the unjust death of the loved one.
The Lovers sets a series of love poems by Pablo Neruda,
the same poet who so memorably inspired Peter Lieberson. Barber
originally wrote them for chorus and 80-piece orchestra, but
what we have here is a new version for chamber orchestra, devised
by Robert Kyr. He writes in the booklet notes that his inspiration
was to make the piece more approachable and more performable:
it is, he writes, “one of the few American choral-orchestral
masterworks of the twentieth century” and he hopes that
the availability of a smaller version would make it more easy
to mount in performance. I admit I haven’t heard Barber’s
original, but Kyr’s arrangement works very well for me.
The orchestral prelude is light and magical, the instruments
weaving a spell in and out of one another and, once the songs
themselves begin, the pairing of chamber choir and chamber orchestra
seems to fit very well. Neruda’s poetry, with its almost
dangerously erotic elements, inspires Barber to concoct ever
more exotic harmonies which he uses to express the very depths
of the complexity of human love and longing. In the hot depth
of this summer is particularly magical, combining a hymn-like
stillness with sensually erotic nature imagery. The solos are
very well taken, and I also really liked Kyr’s arrangement
of the Easter Chorale. Originally a massive brass piece
written to consecrate the central tower of the National Cathedral,
it here becomes a stately hymn which is accessible, and even
intimate.
The performances are excellent, captured in a warm, friendly
acoustic, and Johnson directs the choir with purpose and responsiveness.
This is well worth a look if you’re interested in choral
music.
Simon Thompson
see also review by John
Quinn
Conspirare/Craig Hella Johnson 