Jan Jirasek: Choral Music
Bonifantes Boys Choir, Czech Soloist Consort/Jan Misek
Navona Records 6205
Total Time:  45:25
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Czech composer Jan Jirasek (1955) has written for film (Wild Flowers) receiving Czech Lion Awards for his work.  His works have been performed internationally.  He is also a noted choral composer whose work has been associated with the Bonifantes Boys Choir where he has served as the home composer.  Two of the works on this album have been performed by the choir.

The first of them is the Missa Propria which was featured on the Bonifantes’ Boys Choir North American tour in 2014.  It is a setting of the mass (Kyrie, Gloria-with central Miserere, Credo, and Agnus Dei) that blends ancient chant modes with a more contemporary harmonic palette that weaves the various lines through delicate dissonances into often gorgeous harmonies or unisonal arrival points.  There is a somewhat darker quality that lends itself to a modern medieval musical exploration most apparent in the opening “Kyrie”.  The central “Gloria” has some more interesting developments like a rather chilling slide on the word deo and more disjunct lines that alternate with a more traditional chant-like quality.  This will transfer more into the final “Agnus Dei.”  The piece creates this sort of modern sensibility that is like a final plea, not quite wailing, but still emotionally rich.

From more traditional Christian liturgical texts, the second work, Missa Paralleli, explores a variety of sacred sources.  The goal here is to discover parallels in the threads of religious writing from the Buddha, the Koran, Judaism, and the Latin tradition of the Catholic Church.  The music here continues this exploration of ancient modes and sounds, though adds some contemporary harmonic dissonance touches and spoken words that serve a more percussive role.  The music is equally gorgeous throughout here in a work that has a bit more interesting musical and textual settings.

Finally, Jirasek turns to a variety of nationalist Czech texts and images in Tam, Kde Slava Neprestava.  Here too, these stunning texts are stripped of a more Romantic feel to pre-Renaissance qualities.  The three songs also feature bass trombones, sopranino flutes and percussion.  Some of the ideas heard in the previous pieces further coalesce in these selections.  It would be good to have the texts and translations of these selections though.

Any one of these pieces would be enough to entice one to explore Jirasek’s choral music and it is great to have them all in this package in performances featuring the ensemble he has worked so closely with here.  In a culture entranced by Game of Thrones, Jirasek’s pieces, especially the last work, are certainly going to be attractive.  They tend to fall within those modern pieces that find inspiration in modal writing with just slight polyphonic moments adding additional vigor and harmonic interest.

Coro Del Mundo
Vocal Luna/Maribel Nodarse Valdes
Schola Cantorum Coraline/Alina Orraca
Ansonica Records 0008
Total Time:  66:06
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

A couple years ago when the door to Cuba was reopened, Parma partnered with a number of composers and ensembles to celebrate this hopeful shift in the island’s future.  Coro Del Mundo is a collection of choral works that explores a combination of religious and cultural themes in pieces that explore both sacred and secular texts.  The performances were recorded last November featuring Vocal Luna and the Schola Cantorum Coraline.

The first half of the album features a variety of brief settings of texts that use Cuban rhythms and other Latin American melodic qualities in some exciting folk-like choral pieces.  The collection opens with two works by L. Peter Deutsch.  The Cuban jazz qualities of “Dance to the Revolution” includes handclaps and percussion in an upbeat call for revolution.  “Where Everything Is Music” continues this style for the most part with the addition of soprano saxophone adding a nice lyrical accompaniment against the choral interjections.  Nice shifts of mode are also apparent in this work.  The first half of the album features these blends of Cuban rhythms and declarative text settings.  Using syllables and chant-like interjections, “Canto Del Bongo” by Conrado Monier, is a light folkish work with some nice full choral ideas that add contrast to the call-and-response like setting.  A similar approach follows in Adalberto Alvarez’s “Gozando en la Habana”; “Que Rico E!” by Guido Lopez Gavilan (with some very cool close harmonic writing with extended jazz chords in a mambo and rhythmic vocal sounds) features some really gorgeous lyrical moments; a beautiful setting for female voices continues this folkish style in “Cemento Ladrillo y Arena” by Jose Antonio Mendez (which includes some nasal trumpet solos and quotations); and then two beautifully lyrical pieces first by Electo Rosell (“Murmullo”) and Rafael Hernandez (“Silencio”).

Two slightly larger works kick off the second half of the program.  Cynthia Folio’s At the Edge of Great Quiet is a four-movement exploration of resilience and nature in poetry by Alaskan women poets.  The first movement has more open harmonic ideas with the second finding the piano creating a weaving texture with the melismatic writing floating above the accompaniment.  Descriptive writing with whispers and choral vocalizations of wind lend an interesting aural soundscape to “On A Day of White Trees” which features eerier piano writing.  The final movement shifts to a more positive tone with polyrhythmic ostinato patterns leading to an exciting conclusion.  The other piece connects a bit to the opening number in its themes that support civil rights in Israel for all Jews.  Sacred Rights, Sacred Song is a multi-movement work incorporating music from a variety of composers.  The three movements here are all by J.A. Kowarsky and focus on the rights of women to pray at the Western Wall (“Woman at the Wall”), the equal rights of Arabs and Jews (“A Sacred Shared Prayer”), and a request to help make change for the better in Israel (“Our Sacred Song”).  The music is more contemporary harmonically with simple accompaniment from the piano and additional percussion adding some transitional flavor.  Two works by Michael Murray begin to shift the tone to more traditional choral settings harmonically with beautiful music (“Caminando” and “El Lunar”).  Blending clarinet with vibraphone and other percussion, Meira Warshauer’s stunning “We Are Dreamers” provides a lyrical meditative work that offers dense Lauridsen-like choral writing and a theme that brings us full circle to the more declamatory opening.

The first half of the CD settles in nicely to Cuban-inspired musical forms and rhythms in an exciting opening program.  The seriousness of the final works is still mostly accessible tonally with the final piece being the most dramatic and extensive work on the program.  Overall this is an interesting collection of choral pieces worth exploring and considering for college choirs especially.