Arvo PÄRT (b 1935)
Da pacem, Domine (2004) [4:25]
The Woman with the Alabaster Box (1997) [6:05]
Pēteris VASKS (b 1945)
Plainscapes (2002) [15;00]
Arvo PÄRT
Magnificat (1989) [7:33]
Nunc dimittis (2001) [6:50]
Sir James MACMILLAN (b 1959)
Miserere (2009) [12:24]
Arvo PÄRT
Stabat Mater (1985/2008) [27:27]
Jamie Campbell (violin); Oliver Coates (cello)
The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
The Dmitri Ensemble/Graham Ross
rec. March 2018, The Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, UK; July 2018, All Hallow’s Church, Gospel Oak, London
Texts included
HARMONIA MUNDI HMM905323 [79:44]
It may seem strange to begin this review by talking about a musician who is not heard on this new recording from The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. However, I think it’s very relevant to mention that the producer and engineer is the composer and conductor, John Rutter. He has fulfilled this function in all of this choir’s recent recordings and it’s noteworthy that most of the items – with the exception, I suspect, of the Pärt Stabat Mater, which uses larger forces – were recorded in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral. That’s a venue that Rutter knows very well: he used it for many of the recordings he made years ago with his Cambridge Singers. I’ve heard many recordings that were set down there. The chapel has a lovely acoustic but I’m not sure I can recall that acoustic making so great a contribution to a recording as is here the case. The Clare choir sings beautifully, but the Ely acoustic adds a wonderful aura to the sound they make.
This aura is particularly apparent in the four shorter pieces by Arvo Pärt, all of which are for a cappella choir. Da pacem, Domine was begun a couple of days after the 2004 Madrid bombings and is the composer’s tribute to those who lost their lives. In Pärt’s sincere and very beautiful music one really gets a sense of something that is old yet also new. The Clare College choir sings it marvellously. They’re just as successful in the earlier piece, The Woman with the Alabaster Box. The sound of the choir is truly lovely. The contribution of the Ely acoustic is very important here; the vocal sounds echo in an ideal way and there’s a very satisfying sense of the sound naturally decaying As I listened, I reflected that the composer may very well have had just such a sound in mind.
The Magnificat comes from 1989 and the compositional means are very simple yet the music is highly effective – truly, a case of multum in parvo. The singers demonstrate excellent discipline and control in this piece. That’s true also of their singing in the Nunc dimittis. This was composed several years later and strictly speaking the two canticles don’t form a pair – for one thing, the ‘Nunc’ has a doxology, which the ‘Mag’ lacks. However, they work well together. Much of the setting is subdued so that the major-key climax at ‘lumen ad revelationem gentium’ comes almost as a shock, even if that’s quite a conventional gesture in settings of this text.
It was very shrewd programming to include James MacMillan’s superb setting of the Miserere because although his music is very different to that of Pärt, both composers share an ability to make new music resonate with the music from centuries before. MacMillan’s setting of Psalm 51 is a conscious homage to the famous setting by Allegri; indeed, the MacMillan setting includes both overt and less obvious references to Allegri’s piece. I’ve long regarded this as one of MacMillan’s finest choral pieces, which is saying something, and Graham Ross and his excellent choir give a wonderful account of it.
I’ve heard the MacMillan piece – and indeed the offerings by Pärt – many times, but Plainscapes by Pēteris Vasks was new to me. It’s a most unusual piece, scored for mixed choir, violin and cello. The choir sings wordlessly throughout and, furthermore, their music tends to be in the background with the two solo strings foregrounded. Graham Ross describes the piece as “a sonic journey across [Vasks’] native country”. That country is Latvia and the notes quote a comment by the composer that “The flatlands are one of the dominant features of Latvian landscape, a place where you can see the horizon and observe the starlit sky”. Much of the piece is performed at a low volume, though a climax is achieved towards the end. It seems to me that the music successfully suggests a vast open landscape, all the more so in this highly accomplished performance. I came to feel, though, that the piece was a few minutes too long.
The most substantial piece on the programme is Arvo Pärt’s setting of the Stabat Mater for which the string players of the Dmitri Ensemble (5/4/3/3/2) join the choir. All the items by Pärt on this disc explore his ‘tintinnabuli’ style and Stabat Mater is a choice example. Originally composed for three solo voices (SAT) and three stringed instruments, we hear it now in the composer’s 2008 revision for SAT chorus and string orchestra. It’s another example of Pärt writing highly expressive music and providing an acute response to a text despite deliberately restrained musical means. The present performance is superb; indeed, I think it’s one of the finest I’ve heard. The work begins with very doleful writing just for the strings. That returns at the end, after the voices have finished, and on this occasion I thought of a parallel in the conclusion to James MacMillan’s searing masterpiece, Seven Last Words from the Cross, of which Graham Ross made a terrific recording some years ago (review). That connection between the MacMillan and Pärt works hadn’t struck me before; maybe it was prompted by the inclusion of a MacMillan piece on this present disc. What I didn’t know until reading Graham Ross’s excellent notes is that Pärt ends the Stabat Mater with four bars of silence. That’s a gesture one can easily replicate when listening to a disc; I wonder how often it’s disregarded in live performance.
This is another very fine disc from Graham Ross and the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. We know the choir to be one of the very finest collegiate choirs in the UK and this CD confirms that stature. As I’ve already indicated, the recorded sound is terrific and the documentation is excellent.
John Quinn
