Jon Washburn
     Vancouver Chamber Choir

* Earth Chants - The Choral Music of Imant Raminsh
    - Missa Brevis in c minor*
    - Ubi caritas
    - Earth Chants**
    - Alleluia, Amen^
    - What Voices in an Unknown Tongue^^

Jennie Such (soprano)*, Siri Olesen (soprano)**, Mariateresa Magisano
(mezzo)^^, Nicolo Eugelmi (viola)^^
Vancouver Children's Choir - Senior Girls' Chorus^, Vancouver Chamber Choir*
** ^^
CBC Radio Orchestra*/Jon Washburn
CBC Records SMCD 5219 Total time: 67:17

* Once on a Windy Night - The Choral Music of R. Murray Schafer, Volume 2
    - Once on a Windy Night*
    - Seventeen Haiku**
    - Vox Naturae^
    - A Medieval Bestiary^^

Aldona McLean (soprano)*, Siri Olesen (soprano)^^, Jonathan Quick (tenor)**
^, George Roberts (baritone^ ^^)
Vancouver Chamber Choir/Jon Washburn
Grouse Records 105 Total time: 78:55

Summary for the Busy Executive: Does "wow" suggest anything?

Many argue for Jon Washburn's Vancouver Chamber Choir as the premiere
professional choral ensemble in Canada, and you can easily see good
reasons.  I've only recently heard their music, and as an enthusiastic
choral singer myself, I must disagree.  With the demise of the Dale
Warland Singers, this is probably the best choral group in North America.

What makes them so good?  First, they master all the basics - clear
diction, intonation not only within sections but throughout the entire
group, unanimity of vowel, sharp attack and rhythm, flexibility of phrase.
Added to this is one of the most beautiful blends of sound I've ever
heard.  The beauty is, to a large extent, achieved not only by the right
mix of individual voices, but also by the aforementioned unanimity of
vowel.  It's as if each singer knows what his or her colleague will do
before it happens and then, prior to producing any sound at all, makes
sure to fit in.  This particular aggregation of singers sounds as if
they've been working together for a hundred years.

All of this wouldn't mean much if the group didn't take on repertoire
worthy of them.  Choral music divides pretty much along easy-moderate-hard
fault lines.  A lot of choral music, at least in the United States, aims
at participants who can barely carry off two parts.  Such music wastes
a group like this.  You might as well keep your Ferrari in the garage.
However, Washburn clearly likes challenges and has assembled musicians
who can rise to them.  Nevertheless, no matter how difficult the music
gets, Washburn's chorus always makes it sound natural, fostering the
illusion that they're doing hardly anything at all.

Imant Raminsh, born in Latvia, emigrated to Canada.  His music as well
has crossed many borders, and he enjoys a high reputation among choral
people.  Even New Orleans (where I live) has heard some of his work.
The music has mainly a strong modal flavor, although Raminsh can write
just about any way he wants, and for me it varies in quality.  Raminsh
originally wrote the Missa Brevis for treble choir.  I liked it in that
form but find something jarring about his arrangement for mixed voices.
Stylistically it ranges from modality (and, for Raminsh, "modal" almost
always equals "mystical") to an almost-simplistic, baroque-ish harmony.
The modal stuff, like the "Kyrie," comes off well.  The bright stuff
does not, at least not for adult voices.  The naive color of treble
voices bridges the stylistic gap.  The adults tend to sound brainless
in places like the "Gloria."

The program makes fairly clear Raminsh's mystical turn of mind.  The
"Ubi caritas" unfortunately brings to mind the Durufle setting, mainly
due to the declamation and the predominantly modal character of both.
Earth Chants uses Native American poetry.  The poetry is knockout stuff.
The music seems uneven to me.  Some of it, like the first number ("The
lands around my dwelling"), comes off as too conventional or somehow
not up to the texts.  On the other hand, other parts - like "As my eyes
search" and "War Song" - soar with real poetry.  "Alleluia, Amen," a
genuine choral hit, begins with a texture that sounds a bit like Ligeti's
Lux aeterna, a close worrying of small intervals for the trebles, and
then moves to a Randall-Thompsonish fullness for all voices.  I suppose
Randall Thompson's "Alleluia" comes to mind first, just from the title,
but Raminsh pulls off something of his own.  The best work on the program
I think the extended What Voices in an Unknown Tongue, for the winning
combination of choir and solo viola.  One of my favorite choral pieces,
Klaus George Roy's very Hindemithian Canticle of the Sun, uses the same
forces.  They turn out to give a very noble sound and inspiring music,
in both instances.  The composer sets a text by Canadian artist and
diarist Emily Carr.  I find the texts (mostly rapture in the presence
of nature) somewhat pedestrian and purple on the page, but they inspired
some wonderful music.  The music lifts them.  The fact that Raminsh has
fashioned a substantial, almost ten-minute work in a single movement
from separate diary entries impresses no end.  The choral textures are
highly varied (and very beautiful besides), and yet the whole thing hangs
together.  At times, the music becomes ecstatic, gets your heart to beat
to some universal pulse.  The interweaving of the viola and especially
the solo mezzo (who takes a lead role) just about takes my breath away.
Mariateresa Magisano and violist Nicolo Eugelmi raise the already-high
level set by Washburn's chorus.  The final moments of the work is one
long rapture.

I've long admired the music of R. Murray Schafer.  He gets stuck with
the label "avant-garde," and I guess he is.  However, the avant-gardedness
of his music impressed me less strongly than its beauty.  After all,
nothing dates so fast as the merely up-to-date.  Schafer, like Raminsh,
is drawn to the expression of a pantheistic mysticism.  His primary
impulse is lyrical and, I would say, painterly.  E.  E.  Cummings once
remarked that "In China, the poet is also a painter." In his liner notes
to the disc, specifically to the piece "Once on a Windy Night," Schafer
reveals something about why he thinks up certain devices:

   You want to write a piece about the wind; no easy task.
   You listen to the wind.  But what you write is not the wind,
   rather a piece of music.  Tear it up.  Go and listen again.
   Still it is not the wind that your composition expresses.  Is
   it because you can't hear the wind or because you're afraid
   to write down what you hear?

We see a certain artistic innocence, or at least directness.  Of course
Schafer writes a piece of music, despite his protests to the contrary.
But there's music and there's music.  Do you ever hear anything in the
music other than the composer's reaction to the wind, the state of his
soul?  Do you ever hear the wind itself or something that sounds like
the music the wind actually makes?  In the final piece, the listener
does hear the wind, all done by the human body, including the voice.  In
a town square, I once came across a man sitting on the grass and drawing
a building in front of him in ink.  He never once looked at his pad, as
his hand drew the building in almost-photographic detail.  I get roughly
the same sensation from Schafer's "Once on a Windy Night" as I did from
looking at that drawing rapidly coming into completion before my eyes.

Schafer, to paraphrase Shakespeare's Falstaff, is not only creative
in himself, he is the cause of creation in others.  A Japanese choir
commissioned Schafer's Seventeen Haiku.  Schafer invited the choir members
to submit favorite haiku and even to compose their own.  He then selected
the texts he wanted.  A haiku, of course, is a very short form, and
thus you might expect a fragmentary work.  Schafer, however, confounds
expectations by coming up with a tone poem that takes you from sunrise
to night.  Actually, it reminds me a bit of Strauss's Alpensinfonie, not
in idiom of course, but in its "program." Traditional images of water,
wind, bamboo, and bells, for example, also help knit things together.
It's a wonderful work, filled with new sounds.  However, Schafer isn't
after novelty but after the essence of what he describes.  The new sounds
help him capture this.  In other words, there's a point, refreshingly
made.  I particularly like the clatter of wind through bamboo Schafer
evokes in the fifth haiku.

Schafer wrote Vox Naturae also for a Japanese chorus.  Conceptually,
it wins from the other pieces on the program the title Most Complicated.
Schafer sets a healthy chunk of Lucretius's De rerum naturae (where
Lucretius sets forth his atomic theory of sound), which he analyzes
into three aspects: scientific theory, illustration of theory, and Pan
and his nymphs and satyrs mocking the human world "from hidden places."
Accordingly, Schafer uses three choirs: one on stage (scientific theory
-- straight declamation); one in the hall (illustrating the theory by
how they sing and "distort" the words); one off-stage (Pan and his
cohorts).  It looks a lot more complicated than it sounds (probably due
mainly to the skill of Washburn's singers), and Schafer's own suggestion
of Monteverdi as a point of comparison seems right on the money.  The
effects never call attention to themselves.  They always serve the
expression of the text.

It's hard for me to have a favorite in this program, but the madrigals
of Schafer's Medieval Bestiary charm me out of my socks.  It's not
the usual faux-Renaissance fa-la-la-ing (although you will hear those
syllables), but the work of someone who has really absorbed the spirit
of Monteverdi's writing.

The Vancouver Chamber Choir does nothing short of amaze. Be-bop-like sax
riffs in the Seventeen Haiku aren't merely tossed off, rather precisely
(and insouciantly) articulated.  This is a virtuoso group and no kidding.
I'm absolutely stunned.

I don't get to see many Canadian CDs south of the border (or the Mason-Dixon
line, where I live). You may or may not find them at your local shop.
The interested among you can get a discography from the group's website:
http://www.vancouverchamberchoir.com.

Steve Schwartz