CD Review of Fire of the Soul
By David Vernier
Classics Today (http://www.classicstoday.com)
RATING: 9/9 Artistic Quality/Sound Quality
This program will surprise many listeners who may at first think these early works from Eastern Europe belong to the Italy of Gabrieli or the Germany of Schütz. The antiphonal choirs, the harmonic language, the rhythmic shifts and sudden syncopations, the alternation of melismatic sections with strict chordal style all supports that notion. But if you listen more closely, especially to Polish composer Mikolaj Zielenski's motet In solemnitate Corporis Christi, with its bass-heavy texture and emphasis, you hear some sounds arising from the particular voicing and harmonic movement that seem to come from a place very distant from Venice or Dresden.
These characteristics, ones we today associate absolutely with "Russian" church music, are even more evident in Vasily Titov's (ca. 1650-ca. 1715) Slava...Yedinorodnïy Sïñe (Glory...Only begotten Son), due in no small part to its Russian text, but also to the voicing of the lower parts and the melodic treatment of the upper ones (who often sing in thirds). Ultimately, none of these works could be called a masterpiece equal to those by this period's more illustrious composers, but that takes nothing away from their musicological interest and unquestionable appeal for listeners who love sacred choral music.
Of course, our enjoyment--and the fact that we are even hearing these pieces at all--is primarily thanks to the scholarly effort and superior singing of the Minnesota-based Rose Ensemble. Everything from the Russian diction to vocal timbre to the unusually vibrant sound on many of the open-spaced chords shows a concern for detail and for creating an idiomatic context respectful of the music's time and place.
The program ends with a modern piece, commissioned by The Rose Ensemble. It's a setting of the text Bogoroditse Devo, raduysia (Rejoice, O Virgin Mary), today most famously heard in Rachmaninov's version from his Vespers; but Sergey Khvoshchinsky's (b. 1957) conception is a stunning alternative. Its opening harmonized chant style, uttered in very expressive short phrases, gives way to a beautiful tune sung by a soprano, supported by full, organ-like chords typical of 19th-century Russian liturgical music. The rest of the piece combines these two structural and thematic components into a powerful and moving expression of the text. Except for an odd muffled effect from the small echo choir in Andrzej Rohaczewski's Crucifixus surrexit, the sound, from a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, is ideal for this music, allowing us to hear the richness of the textures and to experience the full-bodied resonance of those glorious harmonies.