VA: Voices of Earth & Air Vol. II
Navona Records

VA: Voices of Earth & Air Vol. III
Navona Records

Navona Records' Voices of Earth & Air series presents compelling overviews of material contemporary choral composers are writing and the stellar vocal ensembles giving voice to it. On these companion volumes, pieces by a diverse crop of composers are performed by Vox Futura, the Prague Mixed Chamber Choir, and the Kühn Choir of Prague. Each volume has much to recommend it, though as expected certain pieces make a stronger impression than others.

While many of the modern choral works on the first set are rooted in biblical texts, Scott Solak's Ave Maria, Helen MacKinnon's Gloria in excelsis Deo, and William Brown's Psalm 23 among them, it would be incorrect to call the volume a collection of sacred works. Other pieces draw from non-religious sources, and the recording is all the richer for it; however much they differ, they combine harmoniously to provide a thoroughly rewarding listening experience. Some composers, such as Solak and L Peter Deutsch, are based in the United States while others were born and reside elsewhere. A work by Scottish composer Helen MacKinnon appears, as do ones by Australian Jonathan David Little, Honolulu-born Daniel Morse, and Peter Greve, who lives in a village outside Amsterdam.

Written in memory of his mother, Solak's haunting and at times austere Ave Maria is given a resplendent reading by Vox Futura. With the group's incandescent harmonies augmented by Heinrich Christensen's organ, Jonathan David Little's Crucifixus, Op.13a achieves a stirring beauty and vibrancy; a “polychoral” anthem for triple choir, the piece is actually a smaller version of the longer Woefully Arrayed, which runs twenty-six minutes. Performed by the Prague Mixed Chamber Choir, MacKinnon's setting of Gloria in excelsis Deo advances through several moods during its five minutes until culminating in an exultant “Amen” at the close. Venturing outside the realm of pure vocalizing, Morse fashions his Nachtlied into an ominous soundscape with the Prague Mixed Chamber Choir singing words by Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl and echoey electronic sounds integrated into the sound design.

Organ, this time played by Karel Martinek, returns for Peter Greve's invocation Give us Peace with six of its seven short parts (it opens with an organ-solo intro) featuring the voices of the Kühn Mixed Choir. Greve uses expressions of peace from four religious traditions to convey the work's humanistic message, that the realization of peace will only happen through the collective will and effort of the earth's peoples. The movements work through episodes of joy, conflict, and destruction before reconciliation and peace are achieved. At album's end, Brown's reverential treatment of Psalm 23 strengthens the impression of a journey successfully completed.

Each listener will naturally have a favourite here, mine being Deutsch's mesmerizing A Fisherman of the Inland Sea for the spell cast by its music and text. With triangles and temple blocks accenting the singing of Vox Futura and Aaron Hatley's narration, the setting merges Ursula K. LeGuin's retelling of a classic Japanese folk story, the tale of Urashima, with entrancing vocal counterpoint and polyphony and an evolving harmonic design centred around modal scales. Presented as a story-within-a-story, the text describes a young fisherman's tryst in a magical underwater kingdom and the startling aftermath, and the cumulative effect of the piece is both magical and mystical.

Similar to the second, the third volume features a wide-ranging collection of contemporary choral works, the material this time performed by Vox Futura and the Kühn Choir of Prague. The composers are perhaps even more diverse than those of the second: appearing alongside numerous American composers (Scott Anthony Shell, Deborah J. Anderson, Garth Baxter, etc.) are Cantonese-born Kong-Yu Wong, Argentinean Santiago Kodela, and Amersfoort, Netherlands-based Hans Bakker.

Presented in four parts and with Vox Futura accompanied by pianist Yoko Hagino, Wong's Three Lyrics of Lu Fang Weng makes for an arresting beginning, especially when sung in Chinese. A solo piano prelude leads into three delicate settings based on texts by the twelfth-century Chinese poet, their intimate expressions of yearning, joy, and sorrow as relevant today as when they were written. The positioning of the Wong work at the album's start was smart for how it immediately draws the listener into the volume.

The pieces that follow are compact, single-movement pieces, each one making its case memorably before ceding the stage to the next. In featuring text by Bengali mystic Rabindranath Tagore, poetry is invoked again in Shell's Gitanjali 1, the composer here also exploring broad emotional terrain within the work's five-minute framework. Complementing the devotional text (e.g., “You have made me endless, such is your pleasure”) is music that exudes sensual allure in its graceful handling of counterpoint and its fluctuations between major and minor modes. William Copper's wholly enrapturing Ave Regina Caelorum achieves a lyrical grandeur in its emphasis on pure intonation and elegant polyphony. Bakker impresses with the luminous Ich habe den Menschen gesehen (I know the human being in its deepest form), its words authored by nineteenth-century German poet Christian Morgenstern. The Kühn Choir of Prague's accompanied by pianist Daniela Valtová-Kosinová for Deborah Anderson's two pieces, the first, Windows, a touching meditation for women's choir, the second, Colorado Prayer, a quietly uplifting setting for mixed choir based on a text by traveling minister Barney Crockett.

In a series project that largely sidesteps political issues, Theresa Koon's Mother of Exiles addresses immigration by drawing from Emma Lazarus's poem The New Colossus, the text famously inscribed on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, …”). Using words associated with democratic ideals such as asylum and equality, Koon overlaps translations of “Mother of Exiles” in sixteen languages to emphasize the point during the powerful supplication. A sociopolitical dimension also emerges in Kodela's The Gulag Within, with its music and text inspired by the tragic events that occurred within the communist Soviet forced labor camp system during the twentieth century. Like Koon, Kodela stresses the fundamental value of each human being, in his case through the use of unusual modulations in harmony, melody, and rhythm.

Departing from the short durations of the other works, the expansive settings of Christopher J. Hoh and Garth Baxter extend past eight minutes apiece. Hoh's veneration Music at The Heart of Creation differentiates itself instantly in enveloping Vox Futura's voices with a tenet of horns. Hoh complements his portrayal of music as central to spiritual worship and life in general with a vocal and instrumental tapestry of immense grace. In Baxter's Still Falls the Rain, the Kühn Choir of Prague is joined by organist Linda Sitková for a lyrical, uplifting piece based on a well-known poem by Edith Sitwell. Though it concerns the suffering experienced by people during WWII, the text and Baxter's music ultimately celebrate the indomitable spirit and hope that have enabled people to survive the most devastating circumstances.

February 2021