Editor’s Choice, Jan/Feb 2016 – Vocal & Choral

“Those who find everything beautiful are now in danger of finding nothing beautiful.” So wrote Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia. And yet according to composer Cary Ratcliff, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda “wrote four volumes of odes to ordinary objects”. Of course that’s not all he wrote; Neruda was after all one of the greatest love poets of all time, and the other two composers featured on this recording of choral settings of Neruda’s poetry have availed themselves of some of his most moving love poems.

Texas-based vocal ensemble Conspirare’s director Craig Hella Johnson writes in a booklet note that he hopes these settings “can serve as a conduit for an ever deepening experience with this sublime and powerful poetry.” And indeed they may, so convincingly do they translate Neruda’s delicate emotional chiaroscuro into accessible music of great lyrical potency.

In Ratcliff’s Ode to Common Things, it is clear that the poet “loves all things” because of their connections with humanity: whether a bed, a guitar, a loaf of bread or a pair of scissors, they are for the poet “perfect things built by human hand” and “so alive”. In Kirchner’s Tu voz (Your voice) and Tu sangre en la mía (Your blood in mine), two of Neruda’s contrasting love sonnets sing of the transcendent and the quotidian aspects of human love. Finally, Grantham brings two contrasting poems – Puedo escribir (I can write) and La canción desesperada (The song of despair) together in a single work which takes the latter poem as its title.

Where Ratcliff augments his forthright, transparent choral settings with lively syncopated rhythms and piano, harp, percussion and guitar, Kirchner’s are more circumspect and unashamedly melodic, employing a single piano as accompaniment. Grantham’s textures are more nuanced again, with violinist Stephen Redfield, soprano Lauren Snouffer and bass James K Bass playing out a discrete yet passionate drama against phantasmagoric choral harmonies.

Redfield, Snouffer and Bass are as rhetorically sensitive to text and texture as guitarist Michael Gratovich, mezzo Laura Mercado-Wright and tenor Eric Neuville in Oda a La Guitarra. And while La Canción Desesperada gains much in power (from a non-Spanish speaker’s perspective) in relation to the remaining works, Johnson and Conspirare’s musical fluency is such that the listener is left in no doubt as to the profound humanistic import of Neruda’s pellucid texts.