(++++) POWERS OF THE VOICE

Bach: Mass in B Minor. Sherezade Panthaki, soprano; Rhianna Cockrell, alto; Thomas Cooley, tenor; Paul Max Tipton, bass-baritone; Cantata Collective conducted by Nicholas McGegan. AVIE. $26.99 (2 CDs).

Kate Soper: The Hunt. Hirona Amamiya, soprano & violin; Christiana Cole, soprano & ukulele; Brett Umlauf, soprano & ukulele. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Intended to confirm belief and lead to inspiration, Bach’s Mass in B Minor has long been a subject of veneration itself, acknowledged as one of the greatest of all works in the classical canon. Religiously surprising – Bach, although a Lutheran, here created a complete Catholic Mass – and subject to the usual musicological discussions and arguments as to its provenance, dates, and reasons for being, the Mass in B Minor transcends all the back-and-forth to become an audience experience that is deeply moving strictly on a musical level, whether or not listeners share the faith underlying it. It is stylistically remarkable: in it, Bach reaches back to Renaissance forms and combines them with his own preferred contrapuntal techniques and a level of chromaticism considered highly modern by the standards of his time. Filled with intricacy and elaborate ornamentation, the Mass in B Minor is often at its most effective when Bach deliberately reduces his vocal and instrumental forces to chamber-music levels – as when, near the work’s end, the Benedictus includes only tenor, flute and continuo. Written in parts over much of Bach’s life (between 1714 and 1749, the year before his death), the Mass in B Minor has a level of consistency in communication that may as well be ascribed to faith as much as to musical skill. It surely partakes of both. Nicholas McGegan, whose history with the work dates back some 50 years, brings all his longstanding knowledge of Bach, and of this music in particular, to a splendid new recording on the AVIE label, featuring the Cantata Collective chorus and orchestra. McGegan’s understanding of the music and its underlying spiritual impetus – and the thorough knowledge of Baroque vocal and instrumental techniques evinced by singers and orchestra members alike – add up to a performance that is musically uplifting and that, through the music, can be emotionally engaging as well. For those not spiritually moved, the musical elements alone make this first-rate recording a deeply involving experience. It is easy, for those so inclined, to dissect elements of the Mass in B Minor structurally as well as musically – for example, the work contains 27 sections, which is 3 x 3 x 3, the Trinity to the third power. But the music itself argues against over-intellectualizing, so varied are those 27 parts, so adeptly does Bach mix choral elements with solos and duets, and so carefully does he manage musical building blocks such as key structure: only five of the sections are actually in B minor, while 12 are in its relative major key (D). Bach organized the work in four folders – an arrangement followed by the titling of the McGegan recording – and all four end in the uplifting major key of D. What is significant in this release is that while McGegan and Cantata Collective are surely well aware of the work’s organizational, structural and foundational designs, the performance sounds anything but hidebound: the music sweeps along from section to section with a seamlessness that belies its creation during an extended time period, and the performers convey the beauty and intended uplift of the material without ever having the work sound straitlaced. Again and again, the beauties of detail come through: flute obbligato with muted strings in Domine Deus, bass with obbligato corno da caccia and two bassoons in Quoniam tu solus sanctus, the many differences of sound in sections with four-part, five-part or six-part chorus, and more. McGegan and Cantata Collective show that the Mass in B Minor is, in significant ways, always new and always contemporary, even in a time period so much more secular than Bach’s and so much less inclined to the creation of musical expressions of the highest order.

     Today’s composers are a great deal more likely to use vocal works to make sociopolitical points – even when they reach well into the past for inspiration. Some composers can do this quite cleverly, one such being Kate Soper (born 1981), whose chamber opera The Hunt is packed with contemporary approaches and sensibilities that are unlikely to sustain over the long term but do not appear to have any such concerns, staying focused on the here-and-now in a kind of forced philosophical manner. The Hunt – which happens to have 26 sections, although the number has no significance – is unusual in design, using three sopranos to tell the story and having each of them play an instrument instead of being accompanied by a separate ensemble. This is diegetic music – that is, the on-stage performers play pieces within the context of the work and can themselves hear the music, thus “breaking” a kind of “fourth wall” of sound as they participate in a narrative, and are aware that they do so, even as they function as characters within it. This and other sensibilities of The Hunt are quite contemporary in nature, even though the work was inspired by medieval tapestries illustrating the hunt for a unicorn through the use of a virgin as bait: lured by purity, the unicorn approaches and can then be captured by hunters. Soper, unsurprisingly for a modern composer, chooses to use the old legend as the basis of a critique of societal attitudes toward gender and sexuality, thus deliberately denying the tale any level of universality that it might otherwise have. She does employ a mixture of styles, including folk and chorale and parlor song and musical theater, and she even uses a mixture of Latin and English to establish the opening scene. Her musical language is unabashedly contemporary: hearing Latin homophony declaimed in strong dissonance with overlays of Sprechstimme is at the very least an intriguing experience. The verbiage (most of it also by Soper, with bits by Christina Rossetti and symbolist poet Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D.) is often self-consciously self-aware, and the vocal techniques tend to make much of the argument difficult to follow even when the underlying music itself is modest in scale. The Hunt is an intriguingly experimental bit of avant-garde sort-of-opera, with some elements of genuine creativity (for instance, the voices in First Sighting speak so rapidly over each other that they sound like electronics, while those voices’ high level of clarity in The Noble Unicorn creates a brief Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque moment). The presentational quirkiness of this (+++) release is actually its most attractive element. It does undermine the intended seriousness of the messages that Soper wants to communicate, but that is perhaps all to the good, since the structure and sound of The Hunt are more unusual and innovative than the rather formulaic meanings it seeks to convey.