* Barber: Prayers of Kierkegaard*
* Bartok: Cantata profana**
* Vaughan Williams: Dona nobis pacem^

Pelton*^ (soprano), Clement** (tenor), Gunn**^ (baritone), Atlanta Symphony
Orchestra & Chorus/Robert Shaw
Total Time: 71:00
Telarc CD-80479

Summary for the Busy Executive: Three overwhelming answers to three
overwhelming questions.

It's almost overkill.  Each work represents its composer at the top of his
game.  One might define a certain kind of genius as the ability to treat
big subjects with breadth and depth.  Vaughan Williams takes on "war, and
the pity of war," Bartok the scary psychological darknesses of folk tales,
and Barber the mystery of God Himself.  As of this writing I have not been
able to listen to more than one work at a time on this CD.  Each one wrings
you out.

I first heard the Barber not long after its premiere.  Someone snuck me
and some high-school choir buddies into a Shaw rehearsal of the Cleveland
Orchestra and Chorus.  Shaw has probably known this work since its
beginning but never recorded it until now.  He's collected at least thirty
years' experience with it, so it's no wonder that this performance knocks
over not only all the others on the CD but also the other recordings of the
Prayers by Mester (on Albany) and Schenck (on Koch).  The work has always
reminded me of Holst's Hymn of Jesus - an evocation of what seems the
history of western music.  Both begin with modern Gregorian chants, and
move to neo-Baroque counterpoint and twentieth-century rhythmic and
harmonic frenzies.  The difference between them is a paradox:  Holst takes
a passionate, mystical text and manages to keep his cool; Barber wraps
intellectual mystical texts in music that packs an emotional wallop.  At
the same time, Barber writes more tightly than Holst.  The opening chant
seems to generate all the rest of the material.  The language is a kind of
chromatically-flavored modality (very suited to the opening chant) that
Barber moved to in his late period.  The liner notes point out the links
to earlier works like Medea's Dance of Vengeance - I'd also add Knoxville:
Summer of 1915.  However, the music also points forward to the piano
concerto and the opera Antony and Cleopatra.  I have no idea why the
Prayers aren't better known.  They constitute one of the choral
masterpieces of the century, and the musical language poses no difficulty
to anyone who can listen to, say, Vaughan Williams without frustration.
They must be hard as hell for a choir - particularly one drawn largely from
a community amateur base - to learn, and they do need an orchestra.  Shaw
gives a searing reading.  The difference between him conducting Atlanta
and Yoel Levi conducting Atlanta on his Barber anthology CD (Telarc 80250)
is the difference between, in Mark Twain's phrase, lightning and the
lightning-bug.  Not that things couldn't be better, like diction.  You do
need to follow the texts in the liner notes.  The opening chant is a bit
stiff, as if the chorus learned it in a mechanical way.  Shaw (and every
other conductor so far) has problems with shaping the final chorale,
rushing both the climax and the closing diminuendo.  On the other hand,
the double canon (at any rate, it sounds that way to scoreless me) in the
second movement ravishes you, and the rip-roaring third prayer both rips
and roars.

The Cantata profana, though adequately played and sung, suffers from the
English translatorese of its original Hungarian text.  In short, the main
rhythm of spoken English is the iamb (short-long), while the trochee
(long-short) is the main rhythm of Hungarian.  The necessity of closing
nearly every phrase with a feminine ending leads to a bunch of present
participles long outstaying their welcome.  Furthermore, the performance is
too suave by half.  This is the choral equivalent of Le Sacre du printemps.
The syllables of the text should be hitting you like blows.  Diction has to
be razor-sharp.  You're better off with Ferencsik on Hungaroton (HCD 12759)
or Dorati on Hungaroton (HCD 31503).  Furthermore, in the second part,
choral intonation goes south - lots of singing around the pitch, a bit
like Darlene Edwards.  Indeed, it no longer sounds like a Shaw chorus.
On second thought, strike "adequately."

Vaughan Williams's anti-war oratorio Dona nobis pacem I've written
about in greater detail in my review of the Hickox CD (available at
www.classical.net).  As far as I'm concerned, Boult (EMI CDM 7 69820 2)
is the measure of all other performances.  It ranges from white-hot rage
and prayer to ecstasy and consolation.  I find in it Vaughan Williams's
learning from and re-fashioning of the Verdi Requiem into a tract for
the times, warning against the rise of Fascism in the Thirties.  By any
emotional measure, it's a big work that takes big chances and succeeds in
the risk.  However, Shaw has the best choir by far.  You can understand the
words - essential in a work which aims to deliver a message.  It consists
largely both of poems by Whitman and of Biblical passages - in other words,
poetry of some complexity, so the choir must work to achieve such clarity.
The choir is rhythmically sharp and flexible.  Intonation is spot on.
Carmen Pelton, the soprano, is the equal of Boult's Sheila Armstrong.
Although Shaw's baritone, Nathan Gunn, has a better voice (a more ringing
tone) than Boult's John Carol Case, he sings worse, falling into what seems
to be the contemporary trap of seldom or never hitting a note straight on,
but with a Guy-Lombardo portamento.  Still, the choir matters more, and
Shaw undoubtedly has the better.  The interpretation differs by quite a bit
from Boult's, however.  With Boult, you get a grand, majestic sweep, but at
the price at times of textural mush.  Shaw seems to strip away the heavy
wax buildup from the work, trading some of Boult's grandeur for a bright,
shining edge.  Boult's reading tells us that Vaughan Williams's oratorio
owes much to Elgar's; Shaw's emphasizes Vaughan Williams's quicker, more
direct mode of expression.  The Atlanta Symphony is just as clear as the
chorus.  I quibble with a couple of points in Shaw's reading - mainly, a
choir-master hokey over-precision on certain isolated words in "The Dirge
for Two Veterans" - but the final two sections (from "We looked for peace"
to the end) have a coherence unmatched by any other account I know.  Shaw
has not only taken the trouble to analyze these parts thematically, he has
drilled chorus and orchestra to always know which part in the heavily
contrapuntal texture (the finale foreshadows the passacaglia of the Fifth
Symphony) must be prominent.  One hears the musical "spine" of the work.
In all, one of the finest of Shaw's last performances.

Telarc sound is both lush and clear. How do they do that?

Steve Schwartz