Christopher Tin: The Lost Birds
Decca Classics

Days after listening to The Lost Birds, its melodies still linger. That's certainly one telling sign of the impact Christopher Tin's latest release can have on the listener and how powerfully its folk themes register. His choral-symphonic work is brought to magnificent life by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the celebrated British vocal ensemble VOCES8, who give resonant collective voice to Tin's moving elegy. Though the work's focus is on the loss of bird species due to human activity, the melancholy tone of the material enables it to stand as a memorial to loss in general. Yet as plaintive as it is in mourning the disappearance of specific bird types (the passenger pigeon, for example), it's also a rapturous ode to their beauty. Even so, the two-time Grammy winner's message is clear: unless we rethink our attitude towards our fellow creatures and the environment we share, our fate might be the same as those now-extinct birds.

Aside from the personnel involved, a key reason why the recording is so stirring has to do with the musical approach Tin adopted for the project, by his own description “a distinctly nineteenth-century musical vocabulary” rooted in folk song melodies, lustrous vocal expression, and string orchestra accompaniment. The twelve-part work includes soaring choral declamations, but its character is largely hushed and hymnal. In keeping with the musical tone, Tin set the words of four nineteenth-century poets—Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sara Teasdale—to music. As he astutely notes, they witnessed the world change from a pastoral society to an industrial one, with all the gains and losses that transition brought with it. More ominously, it also resulted in a world where humans now had the power to reshape the environment and did so, history suggests, recklessly.

In terms of production quality, Tin's fourth album, recorded at London's Abbey Road Studios and with the performers conducted by the composer and Barnaby Smith (VOCES8's artistic director), sounds terrific. The work enters gracefully, with “Flocks a Mile Wide” a gently soaring overture to establish the lyrical tone. Adding to the music's haunting beauty are solo violin and cello solos that separate themselves from the orchestral mass like birds taking flight, and testifying to the music's roots, a trace of Scottish folk music surfaces in the writing. In “The Saddest Noise,” VOCES8 gives stirring voice to Dickinson's text, the ensemble's tapestry of male and female singers a wonder to behold. Its rendering of Rossetti's words in “Bird Raptures” and “A Hundred Thousand Birds” is as affecting, the latter highlighted by string flourishes that call to mind the dance of nightingales. When the singers rise to a resplendent climax in “Wild Swans,” the moment is so powerful it induces chills. That's hardly the only time that occurs, by the way, when all but two parts feature vocals.

October 2022