Musica Viva NY: Crimson Roses: Contemporary American Choral Music
Naxos

Consistent with its commitment to ambitious new material, Musica Viva NY makes its Naxos debut with three compelling and original works by American composers Joseph Turrin, Richard Einhorn, and Gilda Lyons. Led by its conductor and Artistic Director Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez since 2015, the chamber choir dazzles audiences with seasonal concerts at its historic All Souls NYC home base in Manhattan. Comprised of more than thirty singers and instrumentalists, Musica Viva NY has commissioned many works by contemporary composers and performed pieces by Florence Price, Steve Reich, Missy Mazzoli, and others. Crimson Roses: Contemporary American Choral Music is distinguished by the ensemble's superb realizations of the three works but also for including a performance by the great mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade. Having someone of her stature—she's issued over seventy recordings and received countless honours and awards for her life's work—make a guest appearance on the album is a genuine feather in the cap for the choral ensemble.

Einhorn, perhaps best known for his celebrated Joan of Arc-inspired oratorio Voices of Light, is represented by The Luminous Ground, a single-movement work written for Musica Viva NY. In creating the multi-movement a cappella setting Momotombo (2022), Lyons, a respected singer and visual artist as well as composer, drew for inspiration from the majestic volcanic terrain of Nicaragua. As rewarding as both pieces are, it's Turrin's And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair (2018) that is the album's crowning glory. A composer, teacher, and author, he's written works for artists such as Wynton Marsalis, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Hélène Grimaud and seen his music appear on RCA, EMI, Albany, and other labels.

At forty-five minutes and based on poetry of the Great War, the cantata is a work of immense scope and variety. Turrin set music to texts by poets who fought, died, or were otherwise profoundly affected by the conflict, and it was, in fact, his inclusion of Vera Brittain's “Perhaps” that brought von Stade, who retired from full-time performing in 2010, aboard. The poem, written in 1916 when Brittain, then a nurse serving on the front lines, learned that her fiancé had been killed in battle four months after proposing to her, is particularly meaningful to her as her father was killed in WWII as her mother was expecting her; in singing Brittain's heartfelt words, von Stade honours her mother, who never got over losing her husband. The poem is significant also for providing the cantata with its title. When the so-called “The War To End All Wars” finally ended, the pre-war notion that a better world would emerge was overshadowed by the staggering losses it incurred.

After a fanfare-styled instrumental prelude establishes a brooding, portentous tone for the two-part work, the vocal component makes its entrance in “Let us remember Spring will come again – May 1915” with the choir giving dramatic voice to Charlotte Mew's text. Words of optimism by Bruno Frank buoy “Rejoice, friends! That we are alive” before the brutal reality of war sets in with Siegfried Sassoon's “Bombardment" (“The fourth night every man / Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion / Slept, muttering and twitching / While the shells crashed overhead”) and Wilhelm Klemm's “Evening at the Front” with its daily death count. The solo von Stade delivers in the penultimate movement is immensely moving, but the soprano solo Erinn Sensenig contributes to the seventh, “Soliloquy – The Last Meeting” (its text by Sassoon), is memorable too. After the choir's wordless singing paints a plaintive scene, Sensenig muses with dignity and poise upon a beloved soldier's fate (“I know that he is lost among the stars / And may return no more but in their light”).

A tender treatment of John McCrae's “In Flanders Fields” initiates the second part, followed by the image of bewildered canines searching in vain for their now-deceased masters in Albert-Paul Granier's “Poor Dogs.” A solemn “Elegy” sets the stage for “Perhaps” and von Stade's affecting rendering of the heart-wrenching text (“Perhaps someday the sun will shine again / And I shall see that still the skies are blue / And feel once more I do not live in vain / Although bereft of You”) until a reprise of “Let us remember Spring will come again (Epilogue)” provides one final reminder of the costs of war. Tonal shifts occur rapidly as one short movement cedes to the next and battle-eager optimism gives way to despair. Martial drums, strings, and trumpets complement the singing throughout the work and imbue the performance with an appropriate war-like aura.

Inspired by James Turrell's light installations, Einhorn's The Luminous Ground unfolds slowly as a gradually changing soundscape serene in character and pitched at a hush. Premiered by Musica Viva NY in 2023, the lustrous contemplation couples a wordless chorus with tremulous strings and chiming piano for six absorbing minutes. Closing the album is Lyons' suitably epic Momotombo (2022), whose title refers to perhaps the greatest volcanic formation of Nicaragua. Its enduring presence induces reflection upon our own fleeting passage and the many generations that have gazed upon its majestic sight. Incorporating texts by Rubén Darío, Victor Hugo, E. G. Squier, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and Bartolomé de las Casas, Lyons begins by evoking the chugging motion of a train from which Momotombo is viewed by a fifteen-year-old boy. Whereas “The baptism of volcanoes” references Squier's account of “old friars who started for its summit to set up the cross there [and] were never heard from again,” Oviedo's provides a vivid description in “¡Momotombo! – exclamé” of a mountain from whose highest peak smoke rises without ceasing and which shakes the earth many times a year. However daunting a presence Momotombo is, it's nonetheless regarded affectionately by those living in its shadow (“Oh Momotombo... Te amo / Oh Momotombo... I love you”).

November 2024