These three works by Benjamin Britten have enjoyed their share of first-rate recordings, particularly the perennially popular A Ceremony of Carols. This new release from the Pacific Boychoir Academy’s Troubador choristers, recorded in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, is a fairly solid entry, showing admirable attention to detail in diction and dynamics where many other versions falter. The boys’ refined and well-balanced sound makes a fine impression, especially in places like “Wolcum Yole!”, which thankfully is sung at a sensible, moderate tempo that allows Britten’s tricky figures to be heard. Soloist Jacob Wilson exhibits nice tone and a manner unusually assured compared to boy trebles who normally attempt “That Yongë Child” and “Balulalow”. He does have a distracting habit of leaning or easing in to the beginning of each pitch in the slower passages, but these are difficult solos and he does them better than most. The choir opts for the common practice of processing and recessing at the Ceremony’s beginning and end, and it works quite effectively here.
Adult singers (the Pacific Collegium) join the Troubadors for A Hymn to the Virgin and A Boy Was Born–and while these singers also are very accomplished and demonstrate exceptional ability in the notoriously difficult latter work, issues of tempo and recording perspective adversely affect their performances. For the Hymn, where quartet alternates with choir, the engineering places the two groups in an oddly assimilar acoustic, and in A Boy Was Born, the miking seems too close, often negating the cathedral space and creating an overall disorienting presence, making it difficult for a listener to discern where he is relative to the choir. This is odd but not that hard to adjust to.
As for tempo, one example will do: The Three Kings is one of Britten’s more effective evocations of atmosphere, of a mysterious distant time and place, the strange harmonies and undulating lines and pointed accents a dramatic depiction of a long journey. This is perfectly embodied in the Corydon Singers’ slower, more impressionistic treatment, as opposed to the Pacific Collegium’s more matter of fact (although dynamically correct), speedier rendition, which again is hampered by a too close perspective that causes us to focus too much on individual singers and lines rather than on the whole. This recording certainly has its strengths–the Ceremony, especially, and several sections of A Boy Was Born–but it doesn’t surmount the best versions in the catalog, including the abovementioned Corydon Singers, the Sixteen, and the Toronto Children’s Chorus. [Note: This disc is available by contacting the choir’s website–pacificboychoiracademy.org]
