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Posts from the ‘Choral music’ Category

Jul 1

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Under the same sky

In the 55 years since the discreet arrival of the first ECM album, Mal Waldron’s Free At Last, Manfred Eicher’s label has released somewhere north of a thousand albums. Contrary to a cynical early view, they don’t all sound the same. They are, however, distinguished by the presence of set of qualities — musical, aesthetic and philosophical — that appear, in varying proportions, in just about every one of them. You can detect those qualities in four of their recent releases, each of which exemplifies a certain characteristic taken to the very highest level.

1 Vijay Iyer / Wadada Leo Smith: Defiant Life

American jazz from the tradition continues to make its presence central to ECM’s output. Smith’s trumpet and Iyer’s keyboards and electronics weave their way through spellbinding duets subtextually infused with a sense of history. Smith’s “Floating River Requiem” is a dedication to Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader murdered by colonial forces in 1961, while Iyer’s “Kite” acknowledges Refaat Alareer, a leading Palestinian poet killed along with two siblings and four nephews during an Israel air strike on Gaza in late 2023. Sorrow and outrage are present in this music, but it also serves, in Iyer’s words, as a statement of “faith in human possibility.”

2 Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky

Modes from all over the world find their way into the ECM matrix. The Tunisian oud player and composer Anouar Brahem first recorded for the label 35 years ago. On his latest album he is in the company of three of the company’s regulars: the cellist Anja Lechner, the pianist Django Bates and the bassist Dave Holland. Taking its title from a book by the late Edward Said, this album, too, is driven by reflections on the suffering, recent and historic, of the people of Gaza, as outlined in Adam Shatz’s fine sleeve essay. Unfolding with patience and elegance, metabolising elements from Arabic maqam, jazz and European classical music, these quartet pieces ache with grief.

3 Alexander Knaifel: Chapter Eight

By cultivating a widespread audience for the work of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt via its New Series offshoot, ECM helped create the genre known as “holy minimalism”. Alexander Knaifel (1943-2024), born in Tashkent, studied cello with Rostropovich in Moscow in the 1960s before making a reputation writing operas and film music. A kind of an Uzbek version of Anthony Braxton, he also wrote an extended piece for 17 double basses and another for 35 Javanese gongs. But the pieces on this album, performed by an ensemble of three Latvian choirs and the Swiss cellist Patrick Demenga, are settings of verses from the Song of Solomon. Proceeding with great deliberation under the baton of Andres Mustonen, they achieve the required meditative glow to very satisfying effect, fully exploiting the acoustic resonance of the Jesuit church in Lucerne, where they were recorded in 2009.

4 Arve Henriksen / Trygve Seim / Anders Jormin / Markku Ounaskari: Arcanum

The crucial role played by ECM in the emergence of Nordic jazz needs no acknowledgement. Here are four leading players — the trumpeter Henriksen and the saxophonist Seim from Norway*, the bassist Anders Jormin from Sweden, and the Finnish drummer Ouaskari — at the height of their powers, taking memories of Ornette Coleman’s quartet as a starting point from which to develop conversations of great beauty and originality. All four of these albums are outstanding, but this is the one that sounds to me like a future classic.

* Due to a moment of brain-fade, this piece originally claimed that Henriksen and Seim are Finnish. My thanks to those who noticed and gently pointed out the error.

May 20

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Abel Selaocoe & BBC Singers

At one point during last night’s concert with the BBC Singers at Milton Court, the cellist Abel Selaocoe appeared to attach something to his instrument’s bridge that enabled him to make it sound alternately like a kora and a kalimba, and sometimes like a combination of the two. At another juncture he turned it sideways, tapping its back with one hand and its shoulder with the other, creating a groove that swung the whole 25-voice choir. He slapped it, sawed at it, and waved it at the audience, but he also did things that Rostropovich, Casals or du Pré would have recognised and applauded.

He sang a great deal, too, delivering songs in, I think, Sesotho, Zulu and Xhosa in a variety of voices that ranged from a form of guttural sub-bass throat-singing to a silvery whisper via a gentle tenor croon suited to lullabies. And he danced a little, while getting the choir and then the audience to clap and sing along.

Born 31 years ago in a Johannesburg township, Selaocoe — whose name is pronounced Sa-LAU-chay — has made his way via Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music to the concert platforms of the world, collaborating en route with the likes of Famoudou Don Moye, the great percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the saxophonist Tim Garland and the kora player Seckou Keita. As a gifted improviser, it may be that, with the American cellist Tomeka Reid, he is capable of building on the legacy bequeathed to the instrument by the late Abdul Wadud. Last night showed that Selaocoe intends to bring not only his instrumental gift but his own music to the audiences he will meet as his fame grows.

The concert combined his pieces, collectively titled “Music of African Twilight”, with a selection of 11 (of 15) movements from Sergey Rachmaninov’s “All Night Vigil (Vespers)”, a piece for unaccompanied choir written and first performed in Moscow in 1915, during the early stages of the First World War, and here delivered under the baton of Sofi Jeannin, the BBC Singers’ chief conductor. I went along expecting Selaocoe to be contributing interludes between the choral pieces, but that was not the case. The two alternating elements were given equal time and weight throughout.

Rachmaninov’s take on the Russian Orthodox liturgy was sublime, but so was Selaocoe’s evocation of another world, his writing for the choir a full-bodied support to his own singing and playing. On the candelit Milton Court stage, one moment we were under the dome of a cathedral, the next under open African skies. The concert was in no sense an attempt at a fusion of two cultures. It wasn’t even the sort of juxtaposition of two idioms intended to provoke new thoughts, new possibilities. It just was, and when the candles were finally dimmed and the light faded, that seemed enough.

* The concert was recorded by the BBC and will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Tuesday 23 May at 7.30pm, available for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds. Abel Selaocoe’s debut album, Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae), is out now on Warner Classics.

Apr 19

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A cappella in Barcelona

Just off the Ramblas in Barcelona is a square containing the city’s Museu d’Art Contemporani, housed in a plain white modern building by the American architect Richard Meier. Facing it, on the other side of the Plaça dels Ángels, is a convent established by an order of Dominican nuns in the 16th century. Attached to the main building is a small chapel in which, back in 2007, I had an experience I’ll never forget.

The convent now belongs to the museum and for four months that year they used the chapel to house a work by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, who specialises in sound installations. For this one, A Forty-Part Motet (2001), she took a recording by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir of “Spem in Alium”, the 12-minute piece composed in around 1570 by Thomas Tallis for 40 voices, and channeled each individual voice through its own speaker, all mounted at head height on plain stands in a U shape, as Tallis apparently intended his singers to be arranged (the photograph explains how it looked).

There were two plain wooden benches within the U of the speakers, on which one could sit while listening. It was deserted while I was there. The recording opened with the ambient sounds of performers settling themselves. And then it began. “Spem in Alium” is one of the great masterpieces of English music. Within that ancient austere space, the effect of the voices blooming and soaring in overlapping waves, building and receding and building again, was extraordinary.

For the first time through I listened while standing, with eyes open. For the second time, I sat down and closed my eyes. The experience was even more intense. I was inside the music in a way that seldom happens to non-performers.

Today I read of plans to remodel the museum and to turn the chapel into an entrance — the equivalent, they say, of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. They’re good at architecture in Barcelona, so I imagine they know what they’re doing and it’ll turn out just fine. But I’m glad I had that half-hour alone in the chapel, immersed in another world.

* A Forty Part Motet (2001) has been installed in many venues around the world. Janet Cardiff talks about it here: https://youtu.be/rZXBia5kuqY