Something awful has happened to
choral music over the past quarter of a century or so. It has lost its musical interest and become a
vehicle for self-indulgent aural luxury.
A whole generation of 30-something composers have latched on to this
desire among choirs to make a nice noise and little else. Here we have the consolidated outpourings of
one of their leading lights, the Norwegian Ola Gjeilo.
If this is beginning to read like the
ranting of cynical ex-choral director, then simply play this CD and try to
differentiate between the tracks. What
is sacred, what is secular? What is
happy, what is sad? Which piece depicts the praise of God, which is a reflection
on individual loneliness? Even more
difficult to decipher, which is sung by Voces8 and which is sung by Tenebrae? It
all sounds the same, irrespective of which of these two excellent choirs is
doing the singing, who is doing the conducting, and what is added to the sonic
mix by way of instrumental backing.
Decca have not helped their case any by superimposing on to All Hallows’
Church in Hampstead a resonance of such echoing proportions that it all coalesces
into a kind of warm, conglomerate fug.
Much of Gjeilo’s music sounds like
out-takes from soundtracks to recent movies.
Lord of the Rings is the
front-runner in the sound-alike stakes, but there’s a bit of Titanic there as well, not least in the
folksy guitar-infused The Lake Isle (do
we take it there’s an iceberg lurking somewhere in this mist-enshrouded body of
shimmering water?).
Don’t get me wrong. This is lovely singing, and the tracks in
their own way are often very beautiful.
In a word, it is nice. Those who
hanker after a bit of something soothing to put on in the background while they
light their scented candles and pour out the mulled carrot juice should snap
this disc up; it could not be a better atmosphere-maker to an environment of induced
calm. And nobody is going to complain
that it is in any way intellectually challenging or musically demanding.
Voces8 and Tenebrae need no
introduction. They are both extremely
fine choral groups whose effortless and beautifully modulated tone is the
perfect sound for Gjeilo’s slowly flowing, shimmering sonic meanderings. I wonder, however, how even they can be so
dispassionate in articulating the “hosannas” of the 2004 setting of the Sanctus.
When we read in Gjeilo’s notes that the work was conceived on a “cheap
Keyboard I borrowed while living in London” we realise the problem; he did not
want to disturb the neighbours, so kept the sound as musically wall-paperish as
he could. And continuing the theme of
musical wall-paper, in his own piano introduction to “The Crossing”, Gjeilo
proves that he can dribble over the keyboard as dreamily as any Richard
Clayderman clone.
And that is the real issue with
this disc. It exudes a rich, sumptuous,
all-embracing sound, but that sound has nothing to do with the texts or the
character of the texts. Words, it seems,
are coincidental to the delivery of a warming sonic experience.
Accepting this, one can enjoy this
appallingly-short-measure CD simply at face value and move on to something more
musically stimulating once the brain has had its 47 minutes of stasis.
[This review has been published on the MusicWeb International website. IF you want to hear it - you can buy the disc from that site]
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