Schnittke:
Psalms of Repentance; Pärt:
Magnificat; Nunc dimittis. Estonian
Philharmonic Chamber Choir conducted by Kaspars Putniņš. BIS. $19.99 (SACD).
Kim
André Arnesen: Choral Works. Kantorei conducted by Joel Rinsema; Alicia Rigsby,
piano. Naxos. $12.99.
Richard
Danielpour: String Quartets Nos. 5-7.
Delray String Quartet (Mei Mei Luo and Tomás Cotik,
violins; Richard Fleischman, viola; Claudio Jaffé,
cello). Naxos. $12.99.
It is no surprise that attempts at spiritual connection through music
continue unabated in the works of 20th- and 21st-century
composers – after all, attempts to understand the world and the place of faith
within it are many thousands of years old. But it is a bit surprising that so
many spiritually oriented works continue using an older musical language than
is found in purely secular contemporary music. To be sure, Alfred Schnittke
(1934-1998) was eclectic, even small-c catholic in his musical tastes and orientation,
even before he became a convert to large-C Catholicism in 1982. Schnittke’s
later works tend to be withdrawn, even bleak, but his Psalms of Repentance (1988) are more than that. Using anonymous
texts from 16th-century Russia in a piece created to celebrate a
thousand years of Russian Christianity, the music is certainly dark, even
gloomy, and it is also a very deliberate stylistic blend: traditional
harmonies, often in thick textures, are juxtaposed with tone clusters, and
highly chromatic passages appear alongside ones written using whole-tone
scales. The melodic and rhythmic elements of Psalms of Repentance recall those of Russian liturgical chant only
distantly, and while there is considerable beauty sprinkled throughout the work
– the Sixth Psalm is especially lovely in its ethereality – the most telling
element of the whole piece is the Twelfth Psalm, which is the longest of the
set and is, remarkably, entirely wordless. The humming of the chorus offers an
inevitable feeling of chantlike, meditative spirituality that is quite
different from the Catholicism explored throughout the first eleven psalms,
which tend to be bleak and dour despite many beauties in the choral writing – and
even though all are delivered with warmth, skill and little apparent difficulty
by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir conducted by Kaspars Putniņš, despite the complexity of some of the musical
writing. This is scarcely music for all tastes or all forms of spiritual
seeking, but it is moving and effective despite its generally downbeat tone.
And new light is shed on Schnittke’s settings by the inspired decision to include
on this new BIS CD two shorter spiritual works by Estonia’s own Arvo Pärt, born just a year later than Schnittke (1935) and
still going strong. Both the Magnificat
of 1989 and Nunc dimittis of 2000
offer vocal blending and spiritual feelings different from and complementary to
those of Schnittke, with the lovely serenity of the later work providing an
especially strong contrast with the bulk of Psalms
of Repentance and a moving complement to the larger work’s final section.
Easier to sing and more readily accessible in their emotional
evocations, the dozen choral works of Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen on a new Naxos CD
were all written between 2010 and 2016, but all offer a form of spiritual
connection similar to that of Schnittke and Pärt. And in fact some of Arnesen’s
musical inspiration stands beside Schnittke’s: Arnesen has said that one work
here, Flight Song, is “the song of
new life, fragile as the fall of a feather,” while Schnittke at one point said
in an interview that his task as a composer was “not to think up or create music, but to listen." The
implementation of these composers’ tuning-in to the world is quite differently
expressed, though, notably in the way Arnesen writes particularly for sopranos
in their high range – no fewer than six from the ensemble Kantorei are featured
on this CD – while Schnittke tends to favor lower voices and a more strongly
blended ensemble. Only five of these Arnesen pieces, all of which are led with
care by Joel Rinsema, have been recorded before: the aforementioned Flight Song (2014); Even When He Is Silent (2011), using moving words that were
scrawled on the wall of a concentration camp during World War II; Dormi, Jesu (2012); Cradle Hymn (2010); and The
Lamb (2015), to the well-known words of William Blake. The seven world
première recordings here are O Sacrum Convivium (2014); Child
of Song (2014); The gift I’ll leave
you (2015), commissioned by Kantorei; Making
or Breaking (2015), another Kantorei commission; Pie Jesu (2013), to the familiar sacred text; Infinity (2016); and There We
Shall Rest (2015). Most of the pieces are a cappella, but there is a surprise in the use of a soprano saxophone
(played by John Gunther) in Making or
Breaking. And there are piano parts with Flight Song, The gift I'll leave you, Cradle Hymn and Pie Jesu – although the sound quality of
the recoding venue (First Plymouth Congregational Church in Denver) is not as
kind to the piano as it is to the chorus, whose warmth comes through
particularly notably. Interestingly, pianist Alicia Rigsby also fills the role
of one of the six featured sopranos – on Infinity.
There is a soprano surprise of a different sort in the most-spiritual of
the three quartets of Richard Danielpour (born 1956) on another new Naxos CD.
This is Quartet No. 7, “Psalms of Solace” (2014), whose final “solemn and
prayerful” movement is directly intended to portray the search for the divine after
three earlier movements whose focuses are, respectively, intellect, the force
of will, and romantic love. There is nothing jarring about the sound of Hila
Plitmann’s voice after some initial disquiet when it first appears – just as
the finale of Schnittke’s Psalms of
Repentance achieves the strongest effect of the whole work through
eschewing words, so the introduction of the human voice to supplement the sound
of the Delray String Quartet takes Danielpour’s work beyond the seekings of its
first three movements into a realm where, the composer suggests (just as
Beethoven did in his Ninth Symphony), instrumental sounds alone are not
sufficiently communicative. This quartet is the most interesting of the three
on the CD – all of them world première recordings.
The other two, although well-crafted in largely neo-Romantic style, and
skillful in their deployment of the instruments, are all in all more ordinary.
No. 5 dates to 2004 and is called “In Search of La vita nuova.” It portrays Danielpour’s long relationship with
Italy and is intended to convey a sense of journey and discovery, but does so
only intermittently – although the third and final movement, marked Adagio, cantabile, certainly shows the
composer’s affection for the country. No. 6, from 2009, is titled “Addio,” but
despite the Italian word for “goodbye,” this is not another attempted
travelogue – instead, it is intended to be about family (reflected in the
“family” elements of quartet playing), with moods moving from triste (first movement) to giocoso (second) to another cantabile (finale). There is some
undeniable emotional resonance in the quartet writing here, but the work as a
whole is on the superficial side. For a stronger feeling of meaningfulness and
the attempt to reach out to find it, it is to Danielpour’s “Psalms of Solace”
quartet that listeners will do better to turn.
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