“‘In our album we trace this quest for peace across different lands and eras.” So states mezzo Elina Garanca in the notes accompanying this CD of mostly gentle religious music by mostly well-known composers. Perhaps I’m not tuned in with Elina Garanca’s sense of calm spirituality, but after a few tracks I feared falling into a coma of tranquility.
Garanca’s perfectly produced, caramel-colored mezzo is a thing of beauty; her legato is as smooth and gentle as silk. The opening “Sanctus” from Gounod’s St Cecilia Mass bodes well, and the third track, by the unknown (to me) Latvian composer Ugis Praulins, called Dievaines, which is translated as “The Time of the Spirits” (I had to Google it; DG supplies no translation), is a folksy prayer, arranged here for mezzo, chorus, tin whistle, (occasionally audible) guitar, and eventually large, loud orchestra that makes it sound like a pop anthem, like “Keep on believing”. (Its original scoring was for 12,000 choral voices.)
From then on, the music is mostly familiar: Mascagni’s “Ineggiamo” from Cavalleria Rusticana may be a prayer, but it is not meditative–in context, it is the outpouring of a desperate woman in the midst of an Easter service–and Karel Mark Chichon’s arrangement of that opera’s Intermezzo is a misfire. A prettily sung “Laudate dominum” from Mozart’s Solemn Vespers is followed by a weird arrangement in a strange acoustic for voice and organ of Puccini’s Salve Regina, and “O Holy Night”. Two short choral works by Peteris Vasks precede a dreadful large-chorus-and-mezzo arrangement of Allegri’s Miserere that begins a third lower than composed, then pops up to pitch for the second verse and then moves back down.
Whether or not you find peace in this CD will be a matter of personal faith; I find it dull, for the most part, and despite the beauty of the singing, I find Garanca’s approach to be very one-dimensional. She’s not exactly detached, but maybe her spirituality is so solidly rooted and so inward that we cannot relate to what she’s singing. The result is gorgeous singing and playing that is, somehow, eventually stultifying.
