A picture of an American flag and a (near-microscopic) list of four prominent 20th-century American composers on the cover leaves little doubt about the concept for this (mostly) a cappella program by one of Britain’s finest professional choral ensembles. Or does it? While it’s understandable that big names attract attention and help to sell recordings, the three “biggest” on offer here—Barber, Bernstein, Copland—are not known for their choral works, nor did they devote much time or show much interest in the genre. The true choral composer, Randall Thompson, while devoting most of his compositional energies to works for choir, isn’t so often performed these days, with the exception of one or two pieces.
That said, the Barber, Copland, and Bernstein pieces are certainly not terrible, and they are interesting if only in the way that they reveal each composer’s effort to work strictly with voices, the undertaking of which was an exercise more or less expected at some point in a composer’s career. Barber’s Reincarnations are the best-known and most-frequently performed, mostly because they are there and they are Barber; but honestly, these are not endearing works, not especially agreeable to sing, difficult yet never beautiful, possessed of a stark, academic formality and, in the first and last pieces, set with oddly-aligned rhythms that distort the natural flow of the texts.
The Agnus Dei, concocted from its original, already perfect string quartet/orchestra settings, regrettably saddled with an artificially imposed Latin text, is not a choral piece at all, and no amount of effort, even by a choir as good as this one, will convincingly convert it from a grotesque endurance exercise into a credible vocal work. Another arrangement for choir, this time from an earlier song—A nun takes the veil “Heaven-haven”—has some nice moments, but it’s still a slog. (One of Barber’s more intriguing and successful efforts, a setting of Stephen Spender’s poem about a fallen soldier with the curiously Ivesian title A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map, for male chorus, timpani, and brass, is not included here, presumably for reasons of format.)
The four Copland motets, especially the harmonically imaginative “Help us, O Lord”, with its alluring, undulating two-part thematic idea, and “Have mercy on us, O my Lord”, with its simple yet effective use of contrasting rhythmic and melodic motion between sections of the choir, have a way of becoming more agreeable with repeated listening. They may not be as well known as the Barber works, but they’re better choral pieces. The Bernstein Missa brevis is a re-working of incidental music the composer wrote for a 1955 play. Naturally, it’s got its very exciting moments of rhythmic and dynamic intensity (assisted by tubular bells and other percussion), enhanced by both very dissonant and more stark “open” harmonies—it’s Bernstein, after all! Yet rather than presented as an almost unprogrammable concert work, this would be great to hear in the context of an actual church service.
And speaking of church, and specifically religious music, if one is looking for truly original American choral music, that’s where you’ll find it, namely in the concert spiritual, and in church hymn and gospel arrangements, not in the files of the most celebrated composers like Bernstein. Since there have been actual Americans writing music, which hasn’t been all that long, what we would call classically trained composers generally didn’t write choral music; that was for amateurs, for it was amateurs—glee clubs, schools, and church choirs—who would perform such works. “Real” composers wrote orchestral music; that was where reputations were made and where respectability was awarded.
Unlike in the old European countries, there was no state religion demanding and supporting a constant flow of new music (while also shaping its style), nor, at least in the first couple of American centuries, was there an entrenched network of sophisticated choral institutions or professional choirs eager for innovative, cutting-edge repertoire. So, other than the above-mentioned forms, there never developed a tradition of choral concert music that one could clearly identify as “American”.
Among those trained composers there were exceptions, of course, although not until the 20th century, and names such as Jean Berger, John Ness Beck, Alan Hovhaness, Norman Dello Joio, Harry Burleigh, William Dawson, Daniel Pinkham, F. Melius and Paul Christiansen, and, particularly for their huge repertoire of arrangements, Alice Parker, Robert Shaw, and Walter Ehret will be familiar to many choral aficionados. But these latter labored primarily in the world of school, community, and church choir music—again, not recognized as “serious”, that is until the virtual explosion of interest in all forms of choral music during the past 25-30 years—prompting not only an unprecedented proliferation of all types of choral groups, from children’s choirs to professional ensembles, but a corresponding rise in the sophistication of these groups and an ever-growing demand for appropriately sophisticated, make that “serious”, new music.
And of course, there’s an exception to the exceptions—an important one, Randall Thompson (1899-1984), New York born, Harvard educated, one-time teacher of Bernstein, who decided that choral composition was his thing and subsequently his name became inseparable from the genre. Former repertoire staples such as Frostiana and The Peaceable Kingdom are rarely heard these days, but his anthem Alleluia is among the most popular of all American choral works, written for no less than Serge Koussevitsky for the opening of Tanglewood in 1940, and, owing to its inherent, devastatingly deceptive simplicity, since performed—often to disastrous effect—by every known choir in the universe.
And here is the surprise of this new recording by Polyphony: this British choral ensemble not only revives a tired, worn, oft-abused warhorse, but perhaps for the first time on a recording reveals its full expressive power. Most choirs and their directors over the past 60-plus years have treated this work as some sort of academic exercise—and, disappointingly evident on virtually all of the half-dozen recordings I listened to, uniformly make no effort to honor the detailed instructions in the score regarding tempo and dynamics. Dry, routine, unexciting, and often suffering from the inexact technique and strained effort of amateur voices, the work just gives the impression of being too long, tedious, and repetitive.
But even the professionals screw it up (I’m thinking particularly of the Cantus recording), taking liberties with dynamics and totally ignoring Thompson’s “Lento” in favor of something more like “Andante”, forgetting such niceties as phrasing and (Cantus again) recasting the piece as simply a showcase for nice harmonies and pretty vocal sound. (Thompson was quite direct in his insistence on that “Lento” marking: “The music in my particular Alleluia cannot be made to sound joyous…” The piece was written just after the fall of France to the Nazis.)
We have to be careful using the word “revelatory” in reviews, but that’s exactly what Polyphony’s performance is. In six-plus minutes (not the rushed four and a half of most performances) we’re carried along the work’s long dynamic arc, up and over and down again, but also enjoying the movement of the inner voices (not always discernible on other recordings) and being moved by imaginatively articulated phrasing that, unlike in any other recorded interpretation, gives emotional force and momentum to the many thematic repetitions.
And what do you know—not only do we actually hear real dynamic contrast throughout (not always exactly where written, but reasonably close), but those accents near the end of the piece are delivered with proper definition and force and clarity, resulting not in the chaotic, incoherent culminating vocal blast we’re used to, but in a truly affecting powerful statement we didn’t realize was there. It’s as if Polyphony was coming to this work completely fresh, approaching it with no experience of its well-trod history nor any preconceived notion regarding its performing style or tradition, but rather as a new work, for that’s how we experience it here. And for this alone (and perhaps for a couple of those Copland pieces) choral music fans can be grateful that this recording was made.
