FREE UK SHIPPING OVER £30!

BANK HOLIDAY CLOSING

Please note that our offices are closed from 5pm on Thursday 28 March until 9am on Tuesday 2 April for the Easter Bank Holiday weekend in the UK. All orders placed during this time will be processed as soon as we reopen. Please consider Tuesday 2 April the first working day following placing an order. We will also respond to any queries when we return. Thank you!
The Lamb’s Journey: A Choral Narrative from Gibbons to Barbe...

The Europadisc Review

The Lamb’s Journey: A Choral Narrative from Gibbons to Barbe...

Christopher Lowrey, Ensemble Altera

£12.50

Although in the secular Western world it is easily eclipsed by the festive fuss at Christmas, Easter remains the major feast of the Christian calendar, its atmosphere of joyous celebration heightened by the sombreness of Holy Week that immediately precedes it. It’s an ideal time to release a disc tracing ‘The Lamb’s Journey’, the Lamb in question being the figure of Jesus Christ. This Alpha release has been masterminded by countertenor Christopher Lowery (familiar to listeners from several Baroque and contemporary opera recordings) together with his 23-voice chamber choir Ensemble Altera.In his absorbing and detailed booklet notes, Lowery dra... read more

Although in the secular Western world it is easily eclipsed by the festive fuss at Christmas, Easter remains the major feast of the Christian calendar, its atmosphere of joyous celebration heightened by the sombreness of Holy Week that immediately precedes it. It’s an ideal time to release a disc tr... read more

The Lamb’s Journey: A Choral Narrative from Gibbons to Barbe...

The Lamb’s Journey: A Choral Narrative from Gibbons to Barbe...

Christopher Lowrey, Ensemble Altera

Although in the secular Western world it is easily eclipsed by the festive fuss at Christmas, Easter remains the major feast of the Christian calendar, its atmosphere of joyous celebration heightened by the sombreness of Holy Week that immediately precedes it. It’s an ideal time to release a disc tracing ‘The Lamb’s Journey’, the Lamb in question being the figure of Jesus Christ. This Alpha release has been masterminded by countertenor Christopher Lowery (familiar to listeners from several Baroque and contemporary opera recordings) together with his 23-voice chamber choir Ensemble Altera.

In his absorbing and detailed booklet notes, Lowery draws parallels between events in the life of Jesus (as marked across the liturgical year) and the ‘monomyth’ proposed in Joseph Campbell’s posthumously-published book The Hero’s Journey (1990). The Christian story contains many elements (The Call, The Trial, The Return…) that have parallels far beyond the confines of institutionalised Christianity.

As it happens, this ‘choral narrative’ is comprised exclusively of sacred church music, but Lowery’s point is that these works – chronologically and stylistically varied as they are – can have a far wider appeal and relevance than the immediate circumstances for which they were composed. The performances themselves are wonderfully refined and expertly blended, with that combination of radiance, power and transparency that comes with the best chamber choirs. Although formed only relatively recently, the Ensemble Altera (based in Providence, Rhode Island) certainly lives up to its ambition ‘to be the beating heart of professional choral music in the United States.’

The programme mixes early and modern classics with new compositions and arrangements. Composed to a text from the feast of Christ the King, Joanna Marsh’s Worthy is the Lamb immediately commands attention with its angular lines, biting harmonies and incisive organ accompaniment (the player is uncredited). The opening of Herbert Howells’s Requiem, ‘Salvator mundi’ brings the first of many striking contrasts, its anguished lines exquisitely shaped. A new setting of William Blake’s ‘The Lamb’ by Zuzanna Koziej draws the listener teasingly into its mesmerising soundworld, the vocal lines and words projected with remarkable suppleness and delicacy. It’s a fascinating alternative to the now ubiquitous work by the late John Tavener.

The first of three Agnus Dei settings on the disc presents this prayer to the Lamb of God as set in Poulenc’s Mass in G major, its opening soprano solo sung with heart-rending beauty and piercing tone. From this moment of great tenderness we are then plunged into the agonies of Holy Week with ‘O vos omnes’ from Pawel Łukaszewski’s Tenebrae Responsories, with its stratified opening and stunningly deployed dissonances. On a purely technical level this is one of the disc’s vocal highlights, and Łukaszewski’s handling of this key Holy Week text is masterly.

‘O vos omnes’ dovetails surprisingly well into the gentler, more inward world of Kenneth Leighton’s ‘Drop, drop, slow tears’ from his Passion cantata Crucifixus pro nobis. The crucifixion theme is carried over into eight-voice Crucifixus by Antonio Lotti, a rapt, beautifully paced performance which in many ways forms the album’s centrepiece, its chains of sequences imbued with an air of mournful inevitability. The ‘Agnus Dei’ from Bruckner’s E minor Mass caps this for sheer volume, underpinned by organ accompaniment, in a gloriously expansive account that forms a generous nod to this year’s bicentenary celebrations as well as emphasising the visionary nature of Bruckner’s musical language.

The American Eastertide spiritual ‘Were you there’ in arrangement by Michael Garrepy (a member of Ensemble Altera’s bass section) starts off with a simple solo, but the setting becomes increasingly lavish, at times bringing to mind the high-end arrangements of carols that are a feature of the Christmas season, and building to an ecstatically full-throated climax before the repose of the final bars. ‘Were you there’ takes us from Calvary to the Resurrection, and Easter is celebrated in Samuel Scheidt’s call-and-response motet Surrexit Christus hodie, its dance-like rhythms deliciously pointed, with a pert solo soprano animating proceedings. Scheidt’s English contemporary Orlando Gibbons is represented by his glorious Ascensiontide anthem O clap your hands, and the warm, resonant acoustics of St Paul’s Church, Cambridge (Mass.) add to the captivating sonic glow.

Three works for the feast of Corpus Christi form the climax of the programme. Francis Grier’s haunting Panis angelicus has soprano and tenor solos weaving their lines above undulating lower voices. Messiaen’s 1937 motet O sacrum convivium! begins in a mood of shrouded mystery, but the quintessential harmonic language is enthralling, and it builds to a moment of sheer ecstasy that could only come from this composer. It’s something of a jolt then to the altogether sweeter musical language of Ēriks Ešenvalds, but the eminent singability of his O salutaris hostias, with its pure-voiced solos and duets, vividly illustrates why his music is so popular with present-day choirs.

The disc ends with Samuel Barber’s touching Agnus Dei arrangement of his own Adagio for Strings, and it receives here a performance of rare poise, intense expressivity, carefully controlled dynamics and flawless intonation – characteristics of the programme as a whole, vividly captured by Alpha’s recording team. If it continues to deliver performances of this standard, Ensemble Altera under the inspired direction of Christopher Lowrey will be a group to watch (and listen to!) for many years to come. With a reach beyond the immediate Easter season, this is a compelling disc that should delight fans of fine choral singing throughout the year.

  • BIS

The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Valete: Pollini, Eötvös & Janis

Valete: Pollini, Eötvös & Janis  27th March 2024

27th March 2024

The past fortnight has brought news of the deaths of three major figures from the post-war musical scene: two pianists and a composer-conductor.

Anyone who follows the classical music headlines even slightly will have learned of the death at the age of 82 of Maurizio Pollini. He was simply one of the greatest pianists of the post-war era. Born on 5 January 1942 in Milan, he was raised in a home environment rich in culture. His father Gino was a leading modern architect, his mother Renata Melotti a pianist, and her brother Fausto a sculptor. An environment in which old and new artistic trends coexisted was crucial to developing the young Pollini’s tastes, as was the political environment of Milan in the 1950s. A fellow student was Claudio Abbado (a frequent musical collaborator over the years), and both men were committed from their youth to left-wing causes.

A... read more

View Older Posts

Gramophone Recording of the Month

Played on Record Review