Eric Whitacre: Light & Gold (Decca)
Rating: ****
Nico Muhly: A Good Understanding (Decca)
Rating: *****
Verdict: "Faith, fire and the fantastic are found in recent American choral music."
American composer Eric Whitacre has the wow factor pretty well sussed. The title work of his new album Light and Gold was a YouTube hit this year, beamed out by 185 cyber-connected singers from 12 countries, including New Zealand.
On disc, sung by his own Eric Whitacre Singers, Lux Aurumque,
with its Latin title, is an even sleeker affair. Ligeti-like sheets of dissonance punctuate loops of friendly major and minor chords and it is delivered with an almost chilling precision, presided over by the bright, clear soprano of Grace Davidson. Much the same approach is developed more fully in the longer Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, with its clever madrigal echoes, performed and recorded with the same almost superhuman precision.
Whitacre chooses some classy texts, although ecstasy risks turning to the fulsome in the hymn-like setting of e.e. cummings' i thank you God for most this amazing day. Far more enterprising is the King's Singers' turn as Yeatsian faeries in The Stolen Child.
While Whitacre's laid-back tempi and sonic basking will be meditative manna for some, others might find themselves wanting something a little livelier. The composer's Five Hebrew Love Songs do manage this, but not without a few passing flirtations with the trite.
Nico Muhly is a more radical voice, known in rock circles for his work with groups like Grizzly Bear and Antony and the Johnsons. A Good Understanding is a collection of Muhly's mostly sacred settings delivered by various musicians around Grant Gershon and his Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Resplendent in the spectacular acoustics of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Muhly's Bright Mass with Canons blazes its faith with organ fanfares and a dancing Gloria. Celebratory brass enliven a setting of Senex puerum portabat while some Psalm texts inspire wild percussion and occasional rampaging organ.
The album closes with Expecting the Main Things from You, based on the verse of Walt Whitman. Secular, yet with its own Whitmanesque spiritual uplift, there are nods to Copland.
The loveliest moment? The minimalist shiver running through A Farm Picture (Interlude), five minutes of choral bewitchery.
