Samuel Barber & William Schuman
           Choral Music

* Barber
   - Twelfth Night
   - To be Sung on the Water
   - Reincarnations
   - Agnus Dei
   - Heaven-Haven
   - Sure on this shining night*
   - The Monk and His Cat*
   - The Virgin Martyrs
   - Let down the bars, O Death
   - God's Grandeur
* Schuman
   - Perceptions
   - Mail-Order Madrigals

The Joyful Company of Singers, *Anthony Saunders (piano)/Peter Broadbent
ASV CD DCA 939 Total time: 66:23

Summary for the Busy Executive: Huzzahs for the program.  Modified rapture
for the performances.

Neither Barber nor Schuman's reputation depends on their choral music,
though Schuman wrote a lot of it and Barber made at least three major
contributions to the genre.  Barber contented himself to work in general
a rather conservative vein, which owes a lot to Brahms's choral music.
Almost all of it, however, is first-rate.  Schuman created a unique choral
style.  Some of his works I like better than others, but he has written, I
believe, choral masterpieces.

Barber read several languages, always on the lookout for texts to set.
Schuman's primary poetic inspiration was Whitman.  Schuman essentially
developed the musical concerns of his teacher Roy Harris in his own way.
He also inherited from Harris the idea of trying to sum up the idea and
ideals of the United States in music.  Where Harris relied on a hearty,
sometimes too hearty, optimism, Schuman carried in himself the burden of
the big-city skeptic.  Schuman was ultimately optimistic, but he saw
barriers.

As Mellers points out in his liner notes to this recording, Barber's
main creative impulse was nostalgia for a golden past and an innocence
lost.  Here and there in this recital, I found myself thinking of parlor
songs a la Tibbett and McCormack and of comfortable WASP-y churches.  It's
not that the music itself is all that comfortable, but it does seem to
yearn for that comfort.  Also, in addition to superlative musical invention
and craft, Barber possessed an unusually clear sense of occasion and of
program, perhaps something he picked up from his illustrious uncle and
aunt, Sidney and Louise Homer.  Indeed, well into Barber's career, he
writes Sidney Homer of concerts he's attended and almost always finds
something to say of the place and function of his piece within the program.
This served him exceptionally well in his song and choral writing.  He had
the gift of making a set that would "go." This is evident in his a cappella
masterpiece Reincarnations, a triptych of poems by the Irish writer James
Stephens.  No theme unites the three poems.  The first and last are love
poems, but the second is a dirge for an Irish hero.  Nevertheless,
musically they hang together as a group - God knows how.

Barber wrote most of his choral music before 1943.  In the Thirties, he
was given charge of the choir at Curtis Institute and, like Brahms, wrote
pieces for his choir to sing.  Barber criticized himself ruthlessly and
suppressed a number of these works, including a motet for double choir on
words from the Book of Job.  As far as I know, it's not published, and I've
not heard it.  But what I do know of Barber's choral writing makes me want
someone to record it.  However, the CD opens with his penultimate choral
work, op. 42 (1968), that groups "Twelfth Night," a setting of a wonderful
poem by British poet Laurie Lee, and "To Be Sung on the Water," a less
wonderful poem by Louise Bogan.  Again, nothing really unites these
different texts, but again, they make a nice group.  If you know Barber's
choral music, "Twelfth Night" works familiar ground and finds gold.  The
poem moves from darkness ("No night could be darker than this night") to
light ("the sun of heaven, and the son of God").  Barber had no formal
religious belief.  At best, he was agnostic, but religious imagery and
intelligent explorations of religious ideas appealed to him.  His harmonies
take the spiritual journey of the poem - from grave to radiant.  Much of
its punch derives from new-minted, surprising chord progressions and
pungent dissonance, an idiom Barber carries to the end of the setting.
The Bogan talks of the fragility and transitoriness of life and love - an
idea Barber returns to again and again, in such major works as Knoxville:
Summer of 1915 and Melodies passageres.  The harmonies here flicker far
more insubstantially and the piece is united as much by a rhythmic figure
(depicting the lazy dip of an oar into the water) as anything else.

Reincarnations comes from Barber's early and middle periods.  "Mary
Hynes" dates from 1937, while the final two parts were completed in 1940.
The first number, in praise of the lovely "Mary Hynes," falls into two
sections: excited exclamations and a kind of hushed wonder at the thought
of such beauty.  The first section requires a virtuoso choir as the music
consists of wide, extremely quick runs, momentarily settling on consonances
which make their full effect only when their in perfect tune.  The second
part requires a choir that can spin out long lines with beautiful tone.
"Anthony O'Daly," as far as pure composition goes, is the most striking of
the set.  The main burden of it moves in 3 / 4, but over a bass pedal E in
5 / 4.  It is essentially one long crescendo, as all creation joins in the
lament.  Barber uses canon to screw up the tension.  "The Coolin" (colleen)
continues the ecstatic lyricism of the second part of "Mary Hynes." The
counterpoint is both exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally restrained.

The Agnus Dei is, for me, the joker in the pack.  It's not really a choral
piece at all, but a choral arrangement Barber made in 1967 of his hugely
successful Adagio for Strings.  I've heard that Robert Shaw suggested the
arrangement, which I consider one of his worst ideas.  I love the Adagio
for Strings, and I respect it as great string writing, all the more
impressive since Barber's instrument was the piano. However, the deep
pedal points of the original don't translate well to choral basses, and
the words I've always regarded as stuck on, rather than wedded to the
music.  In Barber's original music for chorus, basses have something
better to do than to hold a note.  I don't deny that it moves listeners
(which may be the most important criterion), just as the original and the
string-orchestra arrangements do.  The Adagio would probably do that if
arranged for tuned percussion.  It's just that Barber wrote better for
chorus than this.

"Heaven-Haven" and "Sure on this shining night" come from Barber's op.
13, songs for voice and piano (1938).  Barber arranged them for chorus
and piano in 1961 and 1941, respectively.  Both enjoyed a vogue among
choirs, especially "Sure on this shining night," a genuine hit, but they
don't seem to appear on many programs these days.  Barber succeeds better
here, possibly because he actually has to make up parts, rather than
transcribe them.  The line from the Agee poem, "All is healed, all is
health," and the harmonic progression at that point provides one of
those rare moments of transcendence only music gives you.  "The Monk
and His Cat" is part of Barber's song cycle Hermit Songs, premiered in
1953 by a very young Leontyne Price, with Barber at the piano. Barber
himself arranged "The Monk" - I don't know when - but again it's not a
success.  The extra voices add very little, if anything.

"Let down the bars, O Death" (1936) is one of those miracles: a great
choral piece within the capabilities of amateur choirs.  Barber's choice of
Dickinson as his poet shows great canniness, since at the time she hadn't
anything like her present eminence.  I'm not much of a Dickinsonian, but
this is one of my favorite poems - with a beautifully unforced image of
sheep coming home to the shepherd Death - probably because of Barber's
setting.  Its harmonic idiom anticipates the far more complex "Twelfth
Night."

The program includes a previously unpublished Barber choral piece -
an elaborate setting of Hopkins's holy sonnet "God's Grandeur." One
hears in it passages that turn up again in slightly altered form in the
Reincarnations, which may be why Barber never published it.  But it's
terrific on its own.  Hopkins in his full-blown "Anglo-savage" maturity is
notoriously difficult to set, mainly because his rhythms keep grinding to
a halt and his nesting of ideas and images seem beyond music's capability
to contain.  Again, Barber performs a miracle.  I've not heard this piece
before, and already I think it one of his best.

Schuman's choral writing strongly resembles his orchestral writing:
strongly syllabic and declamatory, often in two parts, mirror writing
(where bass and soprano lines move in opposite directions) leading to much
of the dissonance, and counterpoint usually implied rather than explicit.
It is a lean, mean, ruthlessly austere style and one surprisingly capable
of encompassing a wide expressive range.  Barber uses more notes and seems
more expressively confined.  Perceptions culls aphorisms from Whitman,
while Mail-Order Madrigals riffs off "found poems" from the 1897 Sears,
Roebuck catalogue.  Unfortunately, Broadbent and his singers miss the style
completely, indulging in a creamy line blander than tapioca.  Schuman needs
a choir willing to press itself on one's attention, rather than politely
cough in the background.  Listening to Broadbent, for example, you'd never
guess that Schuman's madrigals were intentionally funny.  To hear how these
and Perceptions should go, listen to Gregg Smith on Vox CD3X 3037.  You
also get Schuman's magnificent Prelude for Voices (text by Thomas Wolfe)
and Carols of Death, as well as choral pieces by Ned Rorem and the
shockingly neglected Louise Talma.

Just how good is The Joyful Company of Singers? Well, they definitely
perform at a professional level.  Diction is okay.  Intonation is fine,
if not thrilling.  They make good work of the dense counterpoint in, say,
Barber's God's Grandeur.  However, rhythm could be better and attacks less
spongy.  Broadbent, for example, ruins the opening to "Mary Hynes" with a
too-slow tempo and the choir's slightly plummy enunciation.  We no longer
get a sense of virtuosic leaping over danger and sparks.  It's a kind of
Errol-Flynn opening for a choir, and Broadbent gives us C.  Aubrey Smith
instead.  Gregg Smith again set the gold standard on an old Everest LP
(along with electrifying accounts of Schuman's Carols of Death and
Copland's In the Beginning), but Charles Bruffy and the Kansas City Chorale
also outstrip The Joyful Company in their Barber set on Klavier KCD 11052.
Furthermore, The Joyful Company does lack intensity in the Schuman, as well
as an especially beautiful choral tone - the kind that makes warriors weep
- in the Barber pieces.  The Agnus Dei (predictably) pokes along, mostly
due to Barber, but it's a trap a great choir doesn't fall into.  The Agnus
Dei's best recording remains Dale Warland's on American Choral Catalogue
ACC 120.  All in all, I'd buy The Joyful Company for the Barber repertoire
you're not likely to find elsewhere.

Steve Schwartz