Lorelei Ensemble & James Kallembach: Antigone: The Writings of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Movement
New Focus Recordings

On its world premiere recording of James Kallembach's Antigone, Lorelei Ensemble—eight sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, and altos conducted by artistic director Beth Willer—alternates between parts showcasing the group's lustrous harmonies and its individual singers. Recorded in August 2021, the album's a memorable follow-up to the group's 2020 recording of David Lang's love fail, even if, at thirty-seven minutes the CD release could have accommodated a second piece alongside Kallembach's. The argument for featuring Antigone alone, of course, is that it focuses the attention solely on a single work without its impact diluted by the presence of another.

Lorelei Ensemble is renowned for its exacting delivery, smooth vocal textures, and precise intonation. Founded in Boston in 2007, the company has commissioned more than sixty new works and collaborated with composers such as Julia Wolfe, Lisa Bielawa, Christopher Cerrone, Scott Ordway, and others. Kallembach has written extensively for voice and has created numerous song cycles and oratorios in addition to Antigone. A conductor too, he effects a dialogue between present and past in his programming choices and holds the title of Director of Chapel Music and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago, where he conducts choirs and teaches. One hears a similar strain in Antigone in the way it likewise straddles contemporary and traditional styles. While it's a resolutely modern work, echoes of earlier choral writing are also audible.

The subject matter he selected for the work, which was premiered on June 10, 2017 at Boston University's Marsh Chapel, is inspired. When Kallembach began the piece, he chose as a springboard the writings of Sophie Scholl, who, with her brother Hans, was active in the White Rose resistance during World War II. A nonviolent collective of students and University of Munich professor, the group became active in 1942 and denounced in its pamphlets the Nazi regime. Sadly, both Sophie and Hans were sentenced to death and executed a year later for their views.

Having familiarized himself with the White Rose movement, Kallembach realized that a great framework for its story would be Sophocles' Antigone; in his view, “Scholl's writing seemed to meld directly into the words of Antigone, while the anti-Nazi pamphlets distributed by the White Rose movement served as ideal Greek choruses, delivering the Antigone narrative in short, suggestive vignettes.” The inclusion of material from Scholl's personal letters alongside excerpts from White Rose pamphlets heightens the immediacy of the text. The divide separating what we regard as universal values of morality and what those in power hold was as pronounced two thousand years ago as during WWII. In deftly weaving together excerpts from the two sources, Kallembach's work emphasizes how history repeats itself and injustice returns, perhaps in different form yet in essence the same. The natural move is for one to extrapolate from those cases to see how similar miscarriages of justice have played out in other, more recent contexts. Ideally, one comes away from the project questioning the choices one might make were one confronted with similarly unjust decrees from those in power.

Augmenting the singers is a cello quartet, a crafty move by Kallembach that creates contrast between vocal and instrumental textures and allows the strings to punctuate the singers like a Greek chorus. Any commentary on the composition would be incomplete without noting the artfulness with which he melds the elements into a seamless tapestry. The beauty of the singers' voices asserts itself the moment the prologue begins the piece with soaring wordless intonations, though the heavenly effect of the singing is abruptly offset by the stabbing entrance of the cellos. The story involving Antigone and her sister Ismene is introduced next, with the two reacting to their uncle Creon's edict to punish those who defy the throne and to the death of their brother, whose body has been left unburied for having fought against Creon. Mezzo-soprano Christina English takes the first soloist's turn as Ismene, her emotive delivery accompanied by a single cello as she expresses the woman's anguished decision to leave her brother's body alone in order to save her own life. In seeming response, Scholl's diary entry follows, her words from 1942, “But mustn't we all be, at all times / Prepared for the gods to call us to account?” an appeal to a higher principle that Antigone similarly articulates in her defiant reply to Ismene, “I will bury him myself / And if I die in the act, that death will be a glory.”

Soprano Sarah Brailey then gives powerful voice to Creon's “State of the Union”-styled address to the city's elders, though the triumphant mood is shattered when a sentry delivers Antigone to him in chains. Brailey solos again as Creon, though this time her delivery is pained by the realization that his niece has broken the law by burying her brother and done so unapologetically (“Yea, for those laws were not ordained by Zeus…”). As before, the words of Scholl and White Rose return to reinforce the message (“The state is never an end in itself / It is important only as a condition under which the purpose of mankind can be attained…”). Retaining her dignity, Antigone accepts her fate (“No flowers for me, it's death I wed”) and bids farewell to friends and countrymen, after which one final presentation of Lorelei's vocal artistry arrives via “Sophie's Dream” with the solo voices of Brailey and mezzo-soprano Sophie Michaux featured and the lyrical refrain first heard in the prologue returning to bring the work to a poignant close.

August 2022