Corvus Consort & Louise Thomson: Welcome Joy – A Celebration of Women's Voices
Chandos

On their second Chandos album, the UK-based Corvus Consort and director Freddie Crowley are joined by harpist Louise Thomson on an encompassing collection of choral music written for women's voices and harp. On an album designed to celebrate female voices and featuring works by female composers, the inclusion of Gustav Holst might initially surprise. However, the composer of The Planets championed women's voices, taught at a number of girls' schools, and wrote works for the female voice too. Further to that, the three works by him appear alongside one by his daughter, Imogen Holst, who among many other things was a tireless promoter of her father's music and legacy.

Imogen's six-part Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow and Elizabeth Poston's eleven-part An English Day-Book are towering presences on a recording otherwise emphasizing concise pieces by Judith Weir, Gemma McGregor, Olivia Sparkhall, Hilary Campbell, and Shruthi Rajasekar. Despite the variety of material and composers, the release achieves a strong sense of uniformity when the performers are the same throughout. Commissioned by Benjamin Britten for the Aldeburgh Festival, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow comprises six choral settings of poems written by John Keats during a two-month 1818 stay in Teignmouth and is thus coloured by reflections on the Devon countryside. Britten's description of the score as “six little treasures” is supported by writing that sparkles incandescently and the beguiling treatment by the choir and harpist. The titular opening part charms immediately when they dance entrancingly through this absorbing “song of opposites.” The spell carries over into “Teignmouth” when the harp's lilting accompaniment enhances the lustrous sound of the twelve unison-singing altos and sopranos. After a bright folk flavour infuses the polyphonic “Over the Hill and Over the Dale,” “O Sorrow” allows darker shades to temporarily infuse the work. The penultimate “Lullaby” brings a soothing moonlit tone to a work that concludes with a jaunty serenade in 5/8, “Shed no Tear.”

At the centre of Welcome Joy, the first recording of a new performing edition of Poston's An English Day-Book appears, the version prepared by the charity Multitude of Voyces (the musical and literary executor of Poston's creative estate) by cross-referencing sketches, drafts, and manuscripts in the composer's hand along with other materials. Time is fundamental to the work in the way it covers the unfolding of a day, cyclically beginning and ending at nightfall and advancing through dawn, midday, and dusk. The attention's gripped the moment “A Bellman's Song” initiates the work with harp flutterings and choir declamations and the plainsong “Te lucis ante terminum” follows it with a series of hushed prayers blessing sleep and nighttime. Animation and unease characterize “A Night Curse,” after which the harp's clock-like tolling in “Lemady: Maying Song” announces day's arrival. Thomson exploits her instrument's capacity for sound painting to evoke a buzzing texture in the playful “A Charm against the Bumble Bee”—even if we also hear sounds suggesting the insect being swatted away. Midway through the work, a restful interlude for solo harp allows listeners to catch their collective breath before the next leg of the journey begins. The work's prettiest movement is arguably “The Noonday Heat” for the lovely wedding of sultry voices and lilting harp. Simulated bird whoops, cuckoos, and calls by the singers set “Running Set: Spring” apart, while “Sweet Suffolk Owl” does something similar in alluding to the presence of the regal creature as it sits quietly aloft. An English Day-Book was one of many works that were unpublished at the time of Poston's death, which makes this recording, appearing nearly forty years after her passing, so valuable.

The pieces by Weir, Campbell, and McGregor all set music to words by Julian of Norwich, specifically using passages from the fourteenth-century mystic's Revelations of Divine Love. With harp providing rhythmic propulsion to the choir's stirring expression, Weir's We sekyn here rest celebrates God with controlled jubilation whilst also allowing room for an affecting undercurrent of melancholy. The gratitude articulated in the text Campbell used for Our Endless Day finds its counterpart in a reverential vocal part and elegant harp voicings. McGregor's graceful meditation Love was his meaning seduces by coupling solo soprano with harp and a three-part female chorus. Also associated with Julian of Norwich is Lux Aeterna, in which Sparkhall strove to “reimagine the sounds associated with Julian's fourteenth-century voice in the twenty-first century.” Against a softly shimmering backdrop of harp strums and glissandos, the singers' luminous, chant-like intonations mesmerize.

For Two Eastern Pictures, Gustav Holst set music to cantos from the Sanskrit poem Rtusamha¯ra, the first setting, “Spring,” a gently intoxicating evocation of the season and “Summer” an equally enrapturing treatment that alternates between wordless humming and upper-voice ruminations. His fascination with ancient Indian history and culture informed the writing of Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda. The third group of choral hymns from this ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns enchants as it progresses from the alluring mysteries of “Hymn to the Dawn” to the gently flowing “Hymn to the Waters.” The harp is pictorially vivid in the ethereal “Hymn to Vena (The Sun Rising through the Mist)”; enigmatic mystery reinstates itself for “Hymn of the Travellers” to usher the work to a haunting close. One final Holst work appears at album's end, this one, Dirge and Hymeneal, the composer designed “to be sung as the funeral and wedding processions cross each other at the church-door.” How interesting that his concluding work would mirror his daughter's own contrast between joy and sorrow at the album's start.

Before Dirge and Hymeneal, Holst's Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda provides a natural segue-way to the two settings by Indian composer Rajasekar, and, in fact, her pieces were written as responses to the Holst creation. For Ushas – Goddess of Dawn, she adopted a text Holst also used but set it in Sanskrit verse rather than an English translation. Short at three-and-a-half minutes, the riveting piece is nevertheless long enough to cast its contemplative and chant-like spell. Similar in duration, Rajasekar's Priestess evokes the joy of a women-centric gathering with six independent vocal parts that interweave rapturously.

November 2024