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 CD Reviews: Moments of Vision
To order Moments of Vision
click here.
Choir
and Organ
by Shirley Ratcliffe
A most attractive pairing of two British
composers who write accessibly for choirs. Dove's light touch sometimes veers
towards over-simplicity but it is always at one with the text (often mystical
and spiritual), achieving a luminous sonority. Matthews, 15 years older, is one
of the few composers of his generation to have consistently maintained a tonal
language, and these recordings amply demonstrate the depth of his musical and
literary thought and an impressive sense of line and harmonic direction, to
which the performers respond well, despite occasional slight unease in the
tuning.
New Notes
by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Formed in 2004,
the Colmore Consort is a choir of students and young professional singers
specializing in postwar English music. Their first CD features nine works - six
of them recorded for the first time - by Jonathan Dove and David Matthews. The
composers happen to be two of the Consort's patrons (along with Paul Spicer,
with whom the choir's conductor, Charles Janz, studied), and they also
contribute sleevenotes; Spicer produced the recording. If all this suggests
those forlorn recordings on sale at local choral society concerts, then you
would be very wrong. This is a sumptuous disc, beautifully sung and recorded
with great clarity: the Colmore Consort means business.
By committing
to the music of just two composers the group admirably avoids the temptation to
cushion its listeners with familiarity from Howells, Warlock and the like.
Rather than a showpiece recording for just-another-choir, this is a
seriously-intended presentation of works by two current practitioners in the
English choral tradition.
Of Dove's
contributions, Into thy hands and Wellcome, all wonders are from
the more meditative side of his style; the opening Send him is more
exuberant, its distinctive harmonies seeming to owe as much to rock as to
traditional cathedral music. The new recording, Who Killed Cock Robin?,
moves with convincing gravitas through the episodes of the nursery rhyme, along
the way evoking the avian chorus who have come to see the body to the grave.
Matthews's
contributions include his collection of six short pieces for composer and poet
friends Moments of Vision. The more substantial Hurrahing in Harvest
is a setting of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, written for six soloists who
deal extremely well with what is likely the trickiest score here. Taking their
lead from Hopkins's poem, Matthews's chunky dissonances herald autumn's arrival
with equal solemnity and rapture. The Ship of Death is by a distance the
longest work on the recording, and its closing track; it is a pity that here,
for the only time on the CD, the singing just starts to flag on the highest
notes. This is the most minor of quibbles, however, and should not detract from
what is to be hoped will be the first of many valuable recordings of
contemporary English choral music from this ensemble.
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