Incredibly beautiful
Steven Schwartz | Austin, TX USA | 03/15/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"With this CD, Conspirare becomes choral royalty - a line that includes the Christiansons' St. Olaf Choir, the Robert Shaw Chorale, Robert Fountain's Oberlin choirs, Ericsson's Swedish Radio Chorus, Burgess's Purcell Singers, Parkman's Danish Radio Choir, and the Dale Warland Singers - all relatively small groups specializing in a cappella singing. The major pieces - the Howells and the Pizzetti - receive performances that have never been bettered and only rarely equaled.
Craig Hella Johnson, a St. Olaf alum, creates a core sound that combines the best of the Scandinavian and American choral traditions. The singers' tone is "natural," while the mass sound remains clear. The technique is completely there: diction, dynamic (both getting louder and, even harder, getting softer), a musical line full of intent and shade. Their intonation is not just in tune, it's so in tune that it helps build the excitement of a piece.
Beyond this, however, is Johnson's ability to shape long, complex movements, as in the Pizzetti, and to find the right emotional color. This is most spectacularly in evidence in Eric Whitacre's e. e. cummings triptych, 3 Songs of Faith, and the middle movement, "hope, faith, life, love" - essentially a list of Big Emotions. Each item receives its own, appropriate color. The Howells has received many recordings of late, including excellent ones by Warland and by Paul Spicer's Finzi Singers. The Warland emphasizes the austerity of loss, Spicer something more human. Yet I prefer Johnson's reading, which offers genuine consolation to those who mourn.
Nothing on this CD is less than excellent. Conspirare meets the challenge of Austin singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson's Requiem, in a moving, deliberately-spare arrangement by Johnson. One of the hardest things a top-notch choir can do is something simple. The technical hurdles of Schoenberg, Bach, or Ives simply aren't there. Singers must focus on pure communication. Conspirare communicates like crazy. Gilkyson wrote the piece about the tsunami victims. Unfortunately, it also has point for Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In harmonies that recall the music of the Russian Orthodox Church, Conspirare both mourns and heals.
An outstanding CD and a must for choral-music fans."
I concur: CHJ & Conspirare: Choral Music: Superior Singing o
Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 03/20/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Conspirare is a professional choral ensemble, based in Austin, Texas of all places. Its founder-leader is Craig Hella Johnson. His positive musical reputation has grown in regional, national, and international circles. This high resolution surround sound super audio disc was nominated for the Grammy.
All in all, musical things in USA are looking up these economically down-turned days. In discussing the regional German orchestra of the Duchy of Braunschweigh playing Richard Strauss, I have taken occasion to notice that regional bands are slowly but surely doing better and better and better. The same must be said for choral groups; with several choruses in USA that have stood high. Dale Warland and the DW Singers for decades brightened up the choral scene, based in the Minnesota Twin Cities area though hardly limited to that region. Conspirare seems to have been doing something similarly wonderful for the southwest. Ken Bruffy has been leading excellent choral music, in Phoenix, Arizona, and in Kansas City. Many other figures and choruses could be listed; the point being that, after famed USA Choral leader and trainer, Robert Shaw - who simply put choral music on the map, so far as recordings go - choral music looks to be alive, thriving, well.
This disc benefits from entirely excellent sound. It was recorded in the apt acoustics of the Troy Savings Bank concert hall in New York State, USA; and that venue grounds and gathers the singing so well that it is a pleasure to welcome the sound field into your home, via the high resolution surround sound channels that will sonically transport you there. Bravo, to all those at the chorus or at Harmonia Mundi who might have had to hold out against the market odds, in favor of doing a multiple channel super audio disc, not just an easier regular red book one.
The composers involved here include: Howells, Whitacre, Grantham, Pizzetti, Paulus, and Gilkyson. From Herbert Howells we get to hear a tender, floated reading of his grief-stricken Requiem. His nine-year-old son died suddenly of polio in 1935, a loss which deeply affected the composer for the rest of his long life. Howells wrote so much of himself into this piece that he kept it from being done in public until about 1980. One guesses it would have been just too overwhelming to hear such music done live in any conceivable venue, so far as the sensitive composer was concerned. The text is a combination of a key phrase from the standard Latin requiem mass (the first sentence only), plus an English version of the antiphon Salvatore mundi, plus selected Bible verses. Any choral fan who already loves, say, Ralph Vaughan-Williams' Mass in G minor, or Howell's Hymnus paradisi will find this a choral gift of exceeding value.
Eric Whitacre is a living USA composer, renowned for his choral music. He has a free and personal hand with choral textures, tempo and transformations, the whole range of traditional to innovative harmony, and an ineffable musicality that always glows bright within whatever sort of music writing he seems to do. Whitacre's choral music nearly always reaches right out and takes hold of a listener. Conspirare gives us two of Whitacre's Three Songs of Faith. Why they omitted the third song is beyond me, as the SACD disc still has about eight minutes of time unused. I for one would much rather have had the third Whitacre song than one of the other short pieces included; but that is just me. I am a died in the wool, Whitacre fan.
At least we do hear two Whitacre songs - Hope, faith, life, love; and I thank you God for this most amazing day. e.e. cummings is the poet who provides the texts.
The other big choral work on this program is Ildebrando Pizzetti's Messa di Requiem. It is perhaps the most traditional, conservative choral work on the disc so far as its approach to harmony goes. Yet that does not mean that it is flat or boring; just the opposite. Pizzetti in sequence here offers contrast, and enhances this program rather than diminishing. His vocal textures and melodies are quite accessible; yet he handles his materials so deftly that nothing sounds like anybody else. Count Pizzetti as another of the collected, deeply personal choral composers included in this disc.
Single works from three other composers fill out the concert, interspersed between the big names of Howells, Whitacre, and Pizzetti. Donald Grantham wrote a memorial piece for the victims and communities who were willy-nilly targeted by the clock tower sniper shootings on the University of Texas campus in 1966. Stephen Paulus wrote a setting of the hymn tune Prospect, commissioned by those same Dale Warland Singers. Craig Hella Johnson arranged the song that Eliza Gilkyson wrote upon reacting to the Asian tsunami of 2004.
Choral singing here is always at a very high level. Though the venue adds resonance, SACD lets us hear everything, from the most delicate to the massed power of the voices. Blend among the four parts is noteworthy, flexible, and always in service of the music and the listening ear. My wish? I wish Harmonia Mundi would leap ahead and let this chorus do a full Whitacre recording or two, still in marvelous super audio surround sound. What a blessed recording project that would be, year after year after year of spinning the disc on my player.
Highly recommended. Add this one to the special list that now recently logged Nicol Matt and his choral discs, Ken Bruffy and his, and that rock solid choral exemplar, Gaudeamus led by Paul Halley."
Transcendent
R. Gregory Capaldini | Arlington, VA United States | 05/28/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"A friend offered to buy me any CD I wanted, and I asked for this one, having seen it exactly once at my local CD shop. No wonder it got snapped up!
This has utterly impeccable singing, a point on which I am not easily impressed: On this disc you simply will never hear any singer among the nearly three-dozen in the group sounding one iota out of balance with his/her colleagues, soloists included. Moreover, the choice of repertoire is inspired, Howells's haunting Requiem (using a free selection of Latin and English texts) being, for once, the comparatively familiar curtain raiser and Pizzetti's sumptuously chaste Messa di Requiem (offering the standard Latin text) getting the performance it deserves and, let's hope, staying in the active catalog this time.
Other 20-century composers are also handsomely represented. Whitacre's arresting and likely-difficult settings of texts by e.e. cummings are sung, at times, with an astounding delicacy that may never be matched by another ensemble. By contrast, many choral groups will probably take up two somewhat easier selections, Paulus's setting of the tune "Prospect" with new words by Michael Browne and Gilkyson's simple setting of her own intercessory text inspired by the 2004 tsunami disaster.
Dare I hope that this often-hushed program will get nominated for a choral Grammy and actually win, not losing to some bombastic screamfest?"
