Letters
Tarik O’REGAN (b 1978)
A Letter of Rights, cantata to a text by Alice Goodman (2015) [35:17]
David FENNESSY (b 1976)
Triptych, for choir (2014-18) [32:45]
Chamber Choir Ireland
Irish Chamber Orchestra/Paul Hillier
rec. 2018/19, Chapel of All Hallows, Dublin City University, Ireland
Texts and translations included
NAXOS 8.574287 [68:20]
Here’s an adventurous coupling from Naxos. In recent years there has been a considerable upsurge in interest from classical labels outside the Emerald Isle in the work of its talented living composers; this can be traced back to the Naxos brand and particularly to Marco Polo, who released a dozen or so pioneering discs of Irish orchestral music back in the 1990s. This provided many collectors with their initial exposure to the preceding generation of Irish composers, figures such as John Kinsella, Brian Boydell, Frank Corcoran and Seóirse Bodley. Their younger successors, including the likes of Donnacha Dennehy, Gerard Barry, Linda Buckley and Deirdre Gribbin have been blessed to be working in a more favourable recording climate and have benefitted from the exposure provided by labels such as Cantaloupe and NMC. This has inevitably raised the bar in terms of performing standards; sophisticated groups such as the Crash Ensemble have been rightly celebrated for their enthusiastic and energetic advocacy of native talent. The brilliant Chamber Choir, Ireland is another such group; that it has been able to attract a figure as revered as Paul Hillier to direct them speaks volumes. The choir has already produced exceptional discs of Irish fare on Harmonia Mundi, not least Acallam na Senórach – An Irish Colloquy - a enthralling sequence by Tarik O’Regan for choir with guitar and bodhrán. (HMU807486). Since its release a decade ago O’Regan’s reputation has quickly gained traction; it’s no exaggeration to suggest that he is by now one of the most frequently performed and recorded living composers from anywhere. David Fennessy may be less well-known than O’Regan on this side of the Irish Sea but he is very highly regarded at home; thus this coupling of half-hour choral sequences by him and O’Regan is both apt and appealing.
Strictly speaking, Tarik O’Regan is not Irish; as he states on his Twitter account “I'm half Arab (Tarik) and half British/American/Irish (Hamilton O'Regan).” His Letter of Rights was commissioned by Salisbury Cathedral to mark the octocentenary of the Magna Carta in 2015; it is after all home to one of the four surviving copies of the original document. Alice Goodman, John Adams’ librettist for the operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer produced a spartan text for the project, a gaunt commentary on clauses 39 and 40 of the Charter which specifically address the nascent rights of the people to due legal process. Soon after controversy surrounded Goodman’s work on Klinghoffer she decided to re-locate to the UK where she was ordained and where she currently practices as an Anglican rector (in Cambridgeshire). She was an interesting, even provocative choice for the project, as this brief
BBC News clip confirms. The cantata incorporates a palindromic structure; it comprises eight sections of which the fifth ‘The Wording’ is the pivot. Brief orchestral interludes divide each section – the arrangement is thus not too dissimilar from Acallam na Senórach. The instrumental ensemble (strings and imaginatively deployed percussion) is kept pretty busy throughout. O’Regan’s choral writing is most attractive but MacMillan-like in its thorniness; I imagine it must have presented an enormous challenge for the young choristers involved in its premiere. Two years later, Chamber Choir Ireland (and the ICO) under Paul Hillier gave its first performance in Ireland; the present recording was laid down shortly afterwards.
A tolling bell and a softly building string chord form a brief prologue. It recalls Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which I mention as the initial declamatory choral dissonance is pleasingly Brittenish. Chamber Choir, Ireland immediately display striking clarity, confidence and power. The recorded balance between voices and orchestra seems ideal. A rocking string pattern links to the next choral entry, in which Goodman reminds the listener that the production of the parchment on which the charter was inscribed involved the spilling of blood. O’Regan’s writing for choir is wonderfully intuitive and graceful and these singers do it full justice – diction in particular is pin-sharp. In the third panel the Latin words of the Magna Carta are skilfully superimposed above Goodman’s commentary, which now turns to the preparation of the parchment. The sounds are rich in timbral and expressive contrasts. Chimes (are they handbells?) and chugging strings constitute the dominant instrumental effects, but these yield to atmospheric tremolandi at the outset of the next part, a solo-infused fragment which subtly alludes to the arrogance of power (presumably King John’s); Goodman’s chiselled phrases are deployed among accomplished solo voices. This gives way to a powerful section which describes the real status of the people and culminates in the fifth, central panel, the apex of the sequence. O’Regan’s choral writing is gratefully conceived and pleasing to the ear: it is frequently (and of necessity) declamatory in style and understatedly virtuosic, accompanied throughout by lively strings and vivid bass drum rolls. The following two sections are inevitably more melancholy (and less strident) in tone, and I suspect most listeners will find the gradual winding-down of the work to be recognisably consistent with the elegant palindromic design of the whole.
Letter Of Rights makes for a compelling listen; I find it hard to believe that this memorable work is fated to remain a pièce d'occasion. . Its message is universally relevant and constant. It combines dramatic and eloquent choral writing of unequivocal mastery with a brilliant, effective orchestral accompaniment. One fervently hopes that choirs of all hues and castes will be recommencing sooner rather than later during the current uncertainty of post-pandemic release; those with access to small orchestral groups should be beating the doors down to perform O’Regan’s terrific piece. It justifies the price of the disc on its own.
Paul Hillier provides a pithy description of the gestation of David Fennessy’s Triptych. He refers to Fennessy’s earlier piece chOirland which was Hillier’s introduction to this innovative figure. He recalls this work as a “…brilliantly obsessive version of Irish traditional dance music, but for choir a cappella.” This sounded fascinating to me and I found this clip of a live performance by Chamber Choir Ireland – it more than lives up to Hillier’s description. The conductor subsequently approached Fennessy to produce Letter for Michael, the first piece in Triptych, and the two sibling panels followed in due course. The three numbers can be performed individually or as here in cyclical form. Fennessy also writes most sensitively and idiomatically for voices, but I suspect some listeners will find his language somewhat denser and a little more elusive than Tarik O’Regan’s. The first panel, Letter to Michael constitutes a simple setting of a brief, repetitive text written by a woman called Emma Hauck who was a long-term patient at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg during the early part of the last century, The composer was drawn to the visual quality of the original letter, with script so faint and tightly linked the words are all but illegible (it’s reproduced on the front cover of the disc). It comprises a single phrase, “Komm, Michael, Herzenschatzi Komm” (Come Michael, sweetheart, come) which is repeated ad infinitum. Evidently the woman’s pleas were left unsent and unheard; Fennessy’s setting involves tight, plangent, often microtonal harmony which simultaneously projects the claustrophobia of imprisonment and the hopelessness of emotional isolation. If that sounds grim – it really isn’t. Fennessy’s language is certainly challenging but he unfailingly invokes an appropriately melancholy and obsessive mood whilst the choir’s riveting performance reveals unexpected, sustained beauty throughout.
The second piece, Ne Remaniscaris (Remember Not) superficially seems address memory, or amnesia; more specifically it’s about those forced to exist in what appears to be a constantly repeating moment. Fennessy’s introduction alludes to those who endure what he describes as “a permanent present tense”, in other words, those who can form no new memories but maintain at least some of the memories they formed beforehand. On reading this one name inevitably popped into my head, that of Clive Wearing, an early director of the London Sinfonietta Chorus. In the early 1980s Wearing succumbed to a rare, utterly devastating form of amnesia which left him in this state of ‘permanent present tense’. He was renowned as an expert on the music of Orlando Lassus and given that Fennessy loops a fragment of a Lassus psalm setting which forms the insistent pattern that runs through this piece, I’d be astonished if that was pure coincidence, and wonder if Fennessy encountered Wearing’s case as he was planning this piece. Ne Reminiscaris begins with the choir’s rapt rendition of the Lassus phrase, Miserere mei Domine. A tiny cadence is abstracted from this, and repeated obsessively, a hypnotic, rocking motif which expands into a self-perpetuating web of complexity. Ambiguous dissonances seem to hint at the placidity of the original, and in due course yield to it entirely. These two ‘forms’ then seem to bind together, sometimes superimposed atop one another before the Lassus phrase eventually prevails again. Ne Reminiscaris is an extraordinary, ethereal, slow-burn of a piece – coincidence or not, I deem it unlikely that I shall be able to hear it again without thinking of Clive Wearing’s eternal tragedy.
At just shy of fifteen minutes, the concluding panel Hashima Refrain is the most extended. Here Fennessy blends two Japanese texts separated by a millennium; contemporary graffiti left on a ruined building in Hashima, an island near Nagasaki which was gradually abandoned during the 1970s, and the final verses of Sarashina Nikki, a memoir left by a lady-in-waiting from the Heian period (roughly 10th century). Fennessy here attempts to sew together the conceptual threads that connect the texts used in each of Triptych’s three panels; he reimagines the author of the memoir as the creator of Letter to Michael albeit embodied in a different persona during a completely different era, by now looking back on their life. In this way the conceptual arc of Triptych is revealed; the diffuse structure of Hashima Refrain is fascinating and requires virtuosic singing (and extremely focused listening) from the members of the choir throughout. The syllabic echo effects in its opening bars are remarkable. There may well be an over-arching concept that unifies these pieces but that will presumably become more apparent with greater familiarity. For now, it is sufficient to say that I really enjoyed each of the three panels on their own terms. They each demonstrate Fennessy’s engaging craftsmanship and the virtuosity of this superb choir.
It is certainly easy to see why Paul Hillier is drawn to this work; those listeners familiar with the trajectory of his career will assuredly be able to detect the same DNA in the music of O’Regan and Fennessy as that encountered in the Baltic, Danish and American repertoire with which Hillier will forever be associated.
The recording is first rate, amongst the most convincing Naxos choir discs I have heard in recent years. Booklet notes are deliberately sparse but perfectly adequate. Texts and translations are included. The booklet design cleverly incorporates the original texts of Letter to Michael and the Magna Carta. This is a bold and unusual disc which deserves to succeed; it offers something more challenging and substantial than the easy approachability of much contemporary choral music, but there’s nothing to frighten the horses and much that will impress and move lovers of fine choirs.
Richard Hanlon
