March 5, 2010

  • Review: New British Choral Music by James Whitbourn

     

    Whitbourn: Luminosity & Other Choral Works
    Soloists, Commotio conducted by Matthew Berry
    Naxos 8.572458
    Total Time:  68:44
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

     

    British choral music is perhaps most familiar to fans of the many Christmas specials that appear from King’s College, or Cambridge.  The music often appears in contemporary arrangements that come mostly from the Anglican tradition and the pieces often have a simplicity that instantly communicates their texts.  John Rutter practically exploded onto the music scene some two decades ago with powerful contemporary pieces for chorus that combined classic liturgical texts with modern compositional technique and at times jazzier syncopation.  Enter into this realm the music of James Whitbourn.  Whitbourn serves at Magdalen College, Oxford, in a music director role and has slowly built a body of fine choral music much of which appears here.

    The first half of the CD consists of nine shorter pieces that demonstrate the primary characteristics of Whitbourn’s style before we hear the primary newer composition.  The music in the opening three tracks could come from any pen in the past 40 years.  The occasional angular phrase or interesting turn in the organ part may reveal their more current composition.  These are simple pieces mostly homophonic and even homorhythmic in their composition.  The Magnificat opens the disc in a powerful setting of this text.  The Nunc Dimittis maintains a similar sound combining texts in Latin and English.  These are capped off by a restrained but truly beautiful Alleluia Jubilate.  The harmonic writing here is gorgeous and at times quite rich with expanded sevenths and ninths.  But listening closely you can hear a great deal of care in part-writing for voices that surely must be great fun to learn and sing.

    Very brief, A Prayer of Desmond Tutu was commissioned for the BBC and features Tutu reading his prayer against some drumming techniques and minimal choral music.  Next is a slightly more dissonant piece, “He carried me away in the spirit.”  Here the listener is taken to safe dissonances that then shift outward into beautiful harmonic writing.  The slow moving piece is a brilliant display of writing that moves from monophonic lines, to various shifts in musical textures.  The resulting harmonic writing is quite fascinating to behold.  It is a strong piece of music which serves as a companion to the one which follows it, “Pure River of Life,” featuring a text from Revelation coincidentally set by Handel for Messiah.  Here this text takes on a surreal otherworldly quality as it calmly declaims the future promise of the text.  Eternal Rest continues to build on the beauty and simplicity of the previous works but with a bit more writing for tenors shining through.

    The primary showpiece on the disc is the seven-movement Luminosity completed in 2008.  The work takes its title from the collection of medieval and Biblical luminaries that focus on simple, profound, and beautiful truths in their texts.  Whitbourn accompanies these texts with some intriguing musical choices that include the use of a “tanpura”—an Indian drone instrument—that plays against the chorus with some additional organ pedal points subtly in the background.  In addition, there is a viola line that flutters between an Eastern and Western musical sensibility creating at times the effect of a bowed sitar.  This is quite fascinating to experience in the context of the choral texts presented here in slow-moving hymn-like style.  The climactic center of the first movement literally explodes with light with full organ and percussion entering the texture quite powerfully.  The following movements continue with the slow, rich choral writing that at times comes closely together for slight dissonant closer intervals while the viola weaves itself through the texture.  At times, Luminosity has the feel of a religious viola concerto with the choir replacing the orchestra.   The organ tends to be reserved for big moments and gets a few solo sections to close off some of the movements.  Luminosity is a moving piece of writing with those big climaxes firmly in the tradition of great English choral music.

    The recording overall presents the choir a bit distanced which helps to warm the sound.  The organ is recorded well for the most part with a couple of climaxes in Magnificat not quite distorted but definitely pushing the limits (which seems to have been corrected for the other tracks).  The pieces presented tend to be of a singular tempo and the choral textures can truly be appreciated as the music slowly unfolds.  The richness of the harmonies Whitbourn uses creates enough “activity” to give the music a sense of forward movement which is quite an accomplishment.  The mixture of ancient medieval sounding textures coupled with contemporary harmony makes for some beautiful choral textures.

    If you are a church or college choir director this is a must have disc of new choral music that might reveal some potentially fabulous new repertoire.  Some of these pieces are likely far more difficult to pull off but Commotio’s performances help us to hear that the hard work is well worth the effort.  At the same time, the pieces written for the college choirs should be doable by any well-rehearsed choral ensemble.  All around, this may be one of the best choral releases of the year.