Copland: Lincoln Portrait; David
Lang: mountain; Nico Muhly: Pleasure Ground. Maya Angelou, narrator; Nathan
Wyatt, baritone; Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conducted by Louis Langrée. Fanfare Cincinnati. $16.99.
The Bells of Dawn: Russian Sacred
and Folk Songs. Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone; The Grand Choir “Masters of
Choral Singing” conducted by Lev Kantorovich. Ondine. $16.99.
Sing Thee Nowell. New York
Polyphony (Geoffrey Williams, countertenor; Steven Caldicott Wilson, tenor;
Christopher Dylan Herbert, baritone; Craig Phillips, bass); Sarah Brailey and
Elizabeth Baber Weaver, sopranos. BIS. $21.99 (SACD).
Shining Night: A Portrait of
Composer Morten Lauridsen. A film by Michael Stillwater. Hänssler Classic DVD. $29.99.
It is a fair bet that Aaron
Copland’s Lincoln Portrait will be
the main drawing card for a new Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra CD on the
orchestra’s own label, because the familiar work is narrated by the late Maya
Angelou, who is prominently pictured on the CD case with conductor Louis Langrée. This release, the orchestra’s
first with Langrée, features a Lincoln Portrait recorded live in
November 2013, commemorating the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address. And it is a fine performance of the work, narrated by
Angelou with heartfelt intensity and played by the orchestra with all the
solemnity and seriousness the occasion demanded. Objectively speaking, it is
not really “better” as a musical/narrative reading than others, but Angelou’s
recent death and the fact that the recording was made to mark a milestone in
American history will make the CD attractive. But also speaking objectively,
the remainder of the disc has much less to recommend it. The CD as a whole is
very short – just 46 minutes – and couples the Copland with première recordings of two contemporary
works of considerably less interest. One is David Lang’s mountain, spelled in that affected way (with a small “m,” an
approach Lang has also used in other works, for no particular reason). This is said
to be a Copland-inspired piece, but it pays no obvious homage to the earlier
composer. It is a standard minimalist work, somewhat hypnotic in effect,
replete with notes and echoes and slides and other typical-for-its-genre
sounds. Nico Muhly’s Pleasure Ground,
featuring baritone Nathan Wyatt, is described as inspired by landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmstead. It is as flat as a Midwest prairie and as
esoteric as an academic course in architecture. Neither the words nor the music
will be of wide interest, and indeed this whole CD seems very narrowly focused,
targeting Cincinnati Symphony fans and people seeking an auditory souvenir of
Maya Angelou’s life.
Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s richly
burnished baritone tends to be put at the service of almost any kind of music,
and he tends to sing all of it in much the same way: intensely and feelingly
but not always with much attention to composers’ individual styles or to the
meaning of the words. The new Ondine release, The Bells of Dawn: Russian Sacred and Folk Songs, is typical
Hvorostovsky in its eclecticism, vocal quality and inattention to the nuances
and sometimes-significant stylistic differences among the songs. The composers
featured here are scarcely household names: Dobri Khristov, Pavel Chesnokov,
Mikhail Burmagin, Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, Aleksandr Varlamov, Elizaveta
Shashina and Georgy Sviridov. Their works span two centuries, from Varlamov’s
birth in 1801 to Sviridov’s death in 1998. But the stylistic differences among
the pieces are nowhere near as significant as this time span would seem to
indicate, and Hvorostovsky’s handling of the material makes all the songs sound
more similar than different – with, to be sure, great beauty of tone and
considerable expressiveness. The sacred songs are complemented, rather oddly,
by half a dozen folk songs that also get the big, broad Hvorostovsky treatment,
which tends somewhat to overpower their essential simplicity. Hvorostovsky’s
fans will welcome this new collection, but those who are only casually
interested in his singing will not find much that is special here.
The works sung by New York
Polyphony span even more time: seven centuries. And they have a singular focus:
Christmas and its many meanings. The 20 works on this BIS recording range from
medieval and Renaissance considerations of Christmas, including motets and
carols, to modern pieces by contemporary composers Michael McGlynn, Andrew
Smith and John Scott – with O Little Town
of Bethlehem as a conclusion. The
juxtaposition of old music and new, of words in modern and older forms of
English with ones in Latin, is a touch destabilizing, but the inclusion of
Richard Rodney Bennett’s Five Carols,
the highly focused singing and the fact that all the music deals with
essentially the same topic give this very well-recorded SACD greater unity than
might be expected. Particularly interesting sonically are the subtleties of
difference between the countertenor and soprano registers. The works are
uniformly well sung, both in individual parts and in voice groupings, and the
disc as a whole is a very pleasant (if scarcely revelatory) seasonal offering that
includes music that, if not great, is forthright, heartfelt and attractively
devotional.
Songs and choral works are
the entire focus of American composer Morten Lauridsen (born 1943), the subject
of a 2012 documentary film that is now available for fans of the man and his
music. Michael Stillwater’s Shining
Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen follows the usual arc of
biographical/hagiographical documentaries, showing Lauridsen at his Pacific
Northwest home, basking in the beauty of the area, and offering commentaries on
him and his work by poet Dana Gioia, conductors Paul Salamunovich and Robert
Geary, composer/conductor Paul Mealor, and composer Alex Shapiro. Lauridsen is
seen in rehearsals in California and Scotland, and the 56-minute film includes
performances of several of his works: O Magnum Mysterium, Lux Aeterna,
Madrigali, Dirait-on, and Nocturnes. A nicely made film of very
limited interest, this is a chance for fans of Lauridsen’s music and members of
choirs that have performed his pieces to learn more about the composer, to
obtain some insight into his working methods and his thoughts about his art and
craft. Because the film’s orientation is entirely positive, it is strictly for
people who already know and admire Lauridsen and would like to find more
reasons to do so. The included performances – by Volti, Con Anima, the San
Francisco Choral Society and the Aberdeen University Choral Society – are all
fine; but they are not really the point here. The intention of this Hänssler Classic DVD is simply to pay
tribute to a well-regarded contemporary choral composer; and Stillwater’s film
does so with attractive pacing, some lovely visuals, and many complimentary
words from a wide variety of sources.
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