 |
Having been a chorister and choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge and member of The King's Singers for 12 years, Bob Chilcott knows a thing or two about choral and ensemble singing. As well as conducting choirs (he's Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Singers), Chilcott has, since 1997, been a full-time composer - though composition has been a part of his music-making for a lot longer. As he says in his booklet notes, he's been writing music since he was 15; he also subsequently did a lot of arranging for the BBC and the King's Singers. This enormous experience comes through in Chilcott's vibrant and attractive choral compositions, where you get a sense of the settings having grown organically out of their texts, so attuned is Chilcott to words and their import.
In The Making of the Drum, Chilcott's setting, appropriately influenced by African rhythms and singing, preserves the magical and reverential qualities of the text as it moves from the killing of a goat for its skin for the various woods needed to 'The Gong-Gong', which animates not only the drum but, it seems, all of creation. Simone Rebello's marimba in turn helps to animate the more celebratory sections of the work, which feature much shouting and clapping. The following My Prayer, based in part of Purcell's Hear My Prayer, seems an appropriate envoi to The Making of the Drum, Chilcott's setting emphasizing both the individual and the multitudes while evoking eternity. These same qualities are evident in the in the Advent Antiphons, which, with their multiple layers of voices and floating, chant-like structures, collectively have the effect of an eternal supplication.
Chilcott's big break came in 1991 when he sent his setting of Walt Whitman's poem The Runner to Karle Erickson, conductor of the Gustavus Choir (a Lutheran college choir from Minnesota) and was commissioned to write the rest of what was to be The Modern Man I Sing. The same performers subsequently toured and recorded the work. Chilcott gives 'The Runner' an extraordinary sense of movement, recalling in many ways aspects of The Making of the Drum; by contrast, 'The Last Invocation', in which Whitman prays for an easeful death, is gentle and serene. 'One's-Self I Sing' returns to the vigorous energy of the opening setting, its final moments evoking both dance and peals of bells.
Apart from My Prayer, there are many other short, stand-alone works on the disc, of which one of the most impressive is the atmosphere Beach, which features the sublime viola playing of Paul Silverthorne. As for the singing, it is superb throughout, the BBC Singers, no doubt spurred on Chilcott's conducting, giving themselves entirely over to both words and music without for a moment allowing any technical lapses. Of the solo contributions, soprano Olivia Robinson is particularly fine in Pange Lingua, as is tenor Andrew Murgatroyd in Simple Pictures of Tomorrow. The booklet notes and sound recording are both of the same excellence.
Robert Levett - Published by International Record Review, October 2007
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
|
|
