Kühn Choir of Prague: Voices of Earth and Air Vol IV
Navona Records

This recent volume in the Voices of Earth and Air series by the Kühn Choir of Prague and conductor Lenka Navrátilová has much to recommend it. There's the glorious sound of the vocal ensemble itself, of course, but as appealing is the selection of composers whose works appear on the release. Instead of opting for familiar names, the Czech choir elected to go with six living composers who are established yet whose profiles have the potential to benefit from being included on the recording. It's heartening that the company is as committed to performing the work of contemporary composers as pieces by those who bodily left us long ago.

The material rewards too, with the opening setting by Heidi Jacob particularly memorable. In addition to featuring the choir, Lilacs gives soprano Kristýna Fílová a starring role and also features Amina Robinson as narrator. A cellist and conductor as well as composer, Jacob writes music of imagination and adventure, the fourteen-minute Lilacs a case in point. Using Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” (1865) as text, Jason recasts the poem for the twenty-first century, displacing it from its original meaning as an elegy for President Lincoln to speak more generally to the struggles for peace and equality occurring throughout the world today. The choir's voices interweave hauntingly, their vocal lines ascending to towering heights (and Fílová soaring even higher) in one passage and becoming a hushed murmur in another. Entering midway through, Robinson's expressive delivery adds a stirring dimension to the performance when her message of hope augments the vocalists' utterances. Without wishing to suggest that the other composers' works are inferior to Jacob's, there's no denying Lilacs casts a large shadow.

Hailing from the island of Guernsey, Lydia Jane Pugh is represented on the release by two short pieces, My Hiding Place, an uplifting setting of great beauty, and AdiraÏ (misplaced), a comparatively more delicate statement whose yearning tone is no less affecting. Ray Fahrner is likewise represented by two settings, the first his arrangement of Robert Lowry's Baptist hymn from 1869, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” Smartly, Fahrner honours Lowry by allowing the beauty of its melodies to ring forth without cluttering it with unnecessary embellishments. Three verses appear, the first sung by tenor and bass voices, the second elevated by a magnificent soprano, and the third rendered by the full ensemble. For his own That music always round me, Fahrner adapted Whitman's text to his own musical purposes and aspired to distill the poet's characteristic energy into musical form. In this instance, voices multiply into complex counterpoint to convey the sense of celebratory awakening in Whitman's words (“That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long untaught I did not hear, / But now the chorus I hear and am elated…”).

Only one work on the release is in multiple movements, John Robertson's Choruses about Music, Op. 16. Connect by the titular theme, the work's parts are based on respective texts by William Shakespeare, William Congreve, and Robert Herrick: “Orpheus with his lute” (Shakespeare) effectively articulates the power music harbours; “Music has charms” (Congreve) deploys the famous words in service to choral writing of immense grace; and “To music, to becalm his fever” (Herrick) entrances using subtle gestures and silken vocal textures. At album's end, Marty Regan's Alleluia marks the composer's first stab at setting a liturgical text and succeeds splendidly. As its polyphonic vocal lines accumulate, the music swells in grandeur until it reaches its resolving “Amen.”

December 2022