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Editorial Reviews

The pairing of the Australian-British-American Percy Grainger, whose brief works drew heavily on the folk songs of those countries, with the hefty late Romanticism of Norway's Edvard Grieg, seems odd at first. But the two met and spent considerable time together in the months before Grieg's death in 1907, and Grainger later championed the "Four Psalms, Op. 74," of Grieg heard here, and translated their texts from Norwegian into English (that's the version included here). The disc mostly consists of Grainger, whose music resembles neither the nationalism of the late nineteenth century nor the pastoralism of Vaughan Williams. Most of the works on this disc are choral elaborations of folk songs, plus a few works in a similar vein setting quasi-folk poems, by the likes of Kipling or Robert Burns. The dimensions of Grainger's work are modest, but what he was attempting to do was build up imposing musical spaces out of folk songs -- adding chromaticism, extending lines, setting groups of singers against each other. There's a certain sameness to these settings, but there are a few surprises -- hear the whistled descant in "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon" (track 16). The results somewhat resemble what the great American arrangers of spirituals might have come up with had they started with raw materials from the British Isles -- and this is either fascinating or over-precious, depending on one's point of view. Perhaps the most interesting pieces are a few in which Grainger, who had very catholic musical interests, did actually turn to American songs -- "Shenandoah," and the African-American sea chantey "Dollar and a Half a Day," which sounds, right down to its use of a racial epithet, as though it might have served as the model for "Ol' Man River." The five works by Grieg come in the middle of the disc; four are based on Norwegian folk hymns, and they make a convincing middle act for this group of unusual manifestations of the musical-national idea. The major weakness of this reissue disc is the sound. It is no doubt easy for Polyphony, a sweet-sounding and very precise choir, to choose sonic environments that show off its perfect blend, and in the sacred Grieg works the formal, rich space of London's Church of St. John-at-Hackney serves the group well. For the Grainger, the church is all wrong -- it drains the texts of their impact, swallows up the sound of the otherwise able soloists, and generally introduces an unfortunate emotional distance into works that were youthful, original, and a bit impetuous. Nevertheless, this is an offbeat program that will appeal to lovers of choral music, Grainger, the musical scene at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth, or any combination of these. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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