Written for seventeen-part choir with a sparing use of crotales, which are
small metal discs which sound like high-pitched bells, Joby Talbot’s
Path of Miracles is an evocation of four of the major staging posts
along the pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
The text is by Robert Dickinson, which is given in the booklet in English
and French, with a printable copy in German from the Harmonia Mundi website.
The work has been recorded before by the commissioning ensemble Tenebrae on
Signum Classics
(see Rob Barnett’s
review
for further background reading on the composer and this work).
Path of Miracles is a highly effective and accessible work easily
recommendable to contemporary music newbies and sophisticates alike. As
pointed out in Rob’s review, the worlds of Tavener and Pärt are brought to
mind if one is looking for entry levels, but there is much more going on
here than mere pastiche. I was hooked by the strange effect of the low
overtone singing at the very start of the piece, and there is much that is
moving and beautiful in the work, as well as some passages of real passion
and drama. In the end you have to listen for yourself to decide if it has
this effect on you, but with two recordings now available the main question
has to be, which is the one to choose?
I would like to be able to say that honours are about equal in terms of
the competition, but interesting differences are thrown up, and while
personal tastes will play a role here there are criticisms to be made. Nigel
Short’s ensemble Tenebrae on Signum Classics is a little more compact in
terms of timings for each movement, and has a different kind of clarity when
compared to Conspirare. The voices of Tenebrae have a distinctive timbre in
their various registers, with voices or sections emerging from the texture
where Conspirare is more homogenous. Tenebrae is also tighter as a group,
arriving for instance at the climax of that slow opening upward glissando
with spectacular accuracy, something which ends up rather indistinct from
Conspirare. The bass voices also have more character further on in this
movement, and this also applies as a general comment. You may or may not
prefer the English choral sound, but Tenebrae nails the linguistic accents
and the feel of absolute focus and intonation more convincingly throughout
the entire piece. Just into the eleventh minute of
Burgos there are
passages of heartbreaking beauty from the Tenebrae voices, with drooping
figures undermining the chanting voices of the faithful, followed by a
close-harmony chorale which has a real spirit of simplicity and
timelessness. The effect just isn’t the same from Conspirare, who sing with
beauty but somehow fail to make the spiritual hairs on the back of your neck
sit up like radio antennae in quite the same way.
Path of Miracles is a bit of an eclectic mixed-bag in musical
terms, but even where hints of various influences can be traced this remains
an honest and sincerely personal statement. The opening of
Leon is
sublime, and once again it is the sound of Tenebrae which makes you feel as
if you are being drawn upwards towards the heavens by an invisible rope. The
sopranos of Conspirare are also angelic, but everything sounds a little too
diffuse and distant to have a comparable effect – the comparison making you
realise it is the tenors who actually hold the other end of that spiritual
skein, those in Texas just not taking up quite enough slack for you to put
your faith in them not letting you fall.
Santiago has a directness
which is irresistible, and Conspirare makes a lovely sound here. A strong
aspect of this new recording is the sense of devotional commitment you feel
from the performance, portrayed as much as a luminous religious experience
as something developed for the concert stage. The Tenebrae singers enunciate
with that English crispness which again you may or may not prefer, but once
more it is the distinctive character of the timbre in each line which makes
the music so much more affecting. This is a kind of vocal ‘orchestration’
which lifts everything beyond then general ‘choir’ sonority, leading your
ear in all kinds of directions and generating overwhelming effects when
homophonic verticality emerges.
Both recordings are delicious in their SACD sonics, and with the score
instructing the movement of voices from one place to another in the space it
really is worth taking up your central seat for the full experience. With
Tenebrae’s greater clarity this effect is a little more striking from
Signum, but the Harmonia Mundi recording is also admirably spatial.
It is nice to see this work receiving wider attention and more recordings,
but if you already have the Signum Classics release from Nigel Short then
you’ll have no need for this one from Harmonia Mundi. That said, this is
still a very beautiful and impressively produced recording of a fine
contemporary vocal masterpiece, and for that alone it is to be highly
commended.
Dominy Clements
