Barnes & Noble
During a recent membership drive, we offered my KUSC audience a copy of Morten Lauridsen's "Lux Aeterna" as a thank-you gift to those who joined. Our phones rang off the hook. This hypnotically beautiful score might be characterized as contemporary vocal music for people who don't think they like contemporary vocal music, for this Los Angeles-based composer demonstrates that it is possible for contemporary music to speak directly to the heart. Composed in 1997 for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, "Lux Aeterna" is a rich, complex, intensely moving piece that people will be listening to for a long time to come. While the idiom is no more threatening than that of the better-known English composer John Rutter, the music itself is of far greater substance and depth. If you think that modern music is largely confined to the mindless delights of minimalism or incomprehensible noise, then this wonderfully human music will prove how wrong you are. Jim Svejda
All Music Guide
Despite the wide geographical separation between the music's point of origin and that of the performers -- Morten Lauridsen is based in southern California, while Polyphony and its conductor Stephen Layton are as English as they come, with a profound knowledge of the acoustic qualities of London's churches -- this disc represents an ideal match of music to performing forces. Polyphony has specialized in the accessible sort of contemporary choral music, with a warm sound attuned to the ethos of reassurance yet a deliberate precision that builds up long lines and inflects them strongly when necessary. They give definitive performances of a pair of ambitious and sharply contrasting pieces by Lauridsen, both of which have been well recorded in the past but which have never been so nicely addressed to one another.
"Lux aeterna" (1997) is a work made up of five different liturgical texts, beginning with the Introit from the requiem mass ("Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis") and ending with the Agnus Dei from the Mass Ordinary. It is filled with the trademark sounds of this composer, who uses too much dissonance to be brought under the minimalist umbrella but who creates full, lush textures using a relatively restricted (or at least slowly evolving) palette of harmonies and thus makes music with a contemporary kind of calming resonance. "Lux aeterna," for chorus and orchestra, brings the Britten Sinfonia on board; Layton balances all his forces precisely in the splendid environment of St.-Jude-on-the-Hill in London's Hampstead Garden Suburb. The work is complemented by the inclusion of three shorter a cappella Lauridsen pieces in the same vein.
In sharp contrast stand the composer's "Madrigali: Six 'Fire Songs' on Italian Renaissance Poems" of 1987. Here Lauridsen attempts with some success to forge a modern language extended from the madrigals of Gesualdo and Monteverdi. Sharp dissonances are developed out of a single core sonority and build to a moment of supreme tension in the fourth piece, "Io piango" (I weep). In this work, too, Polyphony (now performing in London's Temple Church) remains firmly in control.
Lauridsen has admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. They, and indeed any general lover of choral music, will enjoy this disc. If you sing in a choir, check this recording out to learn just how good choral singing can get. Hyperion's engineers, working on what might be termed their home turf, have delivered this event in full fidelity. James Manheim
Gramophone
Under Stephen Layton’s sensitive and intelligent direction, [Polyphony] produce performances which are both fresh and immaculately detailed.... Lauridsen’s score is, if nothing else, a virtuoso exploration of choral singing technique. As such he could not hope for a more assured or polished performance; or, for that matter, a more luscious recorded sound as Hyperion have produced. Marc Rochester
or link to hear an audio clip.
loading...
© 2009 All Media Guide, LLC