An Old World Premiere and an Ambitious New Choral Work From New York Polyphony

New York Polyphony are pretty much unique in the world of choral music in that they sing world premieres from five hundred years ago as well as from the here and now. The quartet – countertenor Geoffrey Williams, tenor Steven Caldicott Wilson, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert and bass Craig Phillips – are as expertly protean as protean gets. One reason why they’re able to find so much fascinating, previously unreleased early music – beyond simply being experts at sleuthing it out – is that they’re smaller than most choirs and focus on the most intimate side of medieval masses and motets. The other is that they have sufficiently formidable chops to tackle this material – some of which was sung by boys at the time it was written – and Herbert’s steely upper register has a lot to do with that.

Their latest album And the Sun Darkened: Music for Passiontide is streaming at Spotify. The group open with fifteenth century Flemish composer Loyset Compère’s stately, utterly otherworldly Crux Triumphans. The group’s resolute command of the pairing of highs against lows leaves the impression that they are a much larger ensemble: it’s a device that’s worked for everyone from Mozart to Gil Evans.

From there, the group shift seamlessly from a spaciously soaring, brief Josquin piece, to the hypnotic, swaying, terse echo effects and persistently unsettled ancient/modern harmonic juxtapositions of contemporary composer Andrew Smith‘s Salme 55.

A diptych by a slightly later fifteenth century Flemish composer, Adrian Willaert, features more dramatic upper register work. From there the group move on to alternately desolate and delicately rhythmic 20th century Estonian terrain for a psalm setting by Cyrillus Kreek.

Their latest old world premiere is Compère’s nine-part suite Officium de Cruce. It’s a Book of Hours meditation, its brief segments ranging from proto-operatic counterpoint to a mystical sway and back. The rather brooding sixth segment, where those rhythms intertwine, is the highlight. The quartet close the album with a thoughtful, spacious, benedictory work by a Compère contemporary, Pierre de la Rue [editor’s note – no relation :)].

The kinds of venues these guys would typically serenade a year ago are dragging their feet reopening, which only means that crowds are going to stick with the vastly less expensive speakeasy circuit when they do. A radical shift in how live music is presented in New York City is underway. The old venue-centric model is being replaced by a community and artist-based scene…and some would say that change is long overdue.

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New York Polyphony Deliver a Timely World Premiere From 500 Years Ago

Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo!
Facta est quasi vidua domina gentium
Princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo

Those are the opening lines of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, set to music by Spanish composer Francisco de Peñalosa in the early 1500s. New York Polyphony sing the world premiere recording with radiance and gravitas on their most recent album Lamentationes, streaming at Spotify. Here’s a decent translation from the liner notes:

How lonely sits the city that was full of people!
How like a widow she has become, she who was great among nations
She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave

Sound familiar?

But all hope is not lost! The recent push in the New York State legislature to strip Andrew Cuomo of his authority and restore democracy could have game-changing implications for the state of the arts here, and ultimately, around the world. If all goes well we might actually be able to see this once-ubiquitous quartet sing their irrepressible mix of the ancient and the cutting-edge somewhere in this city this year.

The ensemble – countertenor Geoffrey Williams, tenor Steven Caldicott Wilson, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert and bass Craig Phillips – bookend their Peñalosa premiere around a brief, rather somber stabat mater by his contemporary, Pedro de Escobar. They open the album’s centerpiece slowly and stately, rising to the daunting demands of the composer’s range throughout this requiem for Jerusalem in the wake of the attack by Babylonian forces in 568 BC. Their unswerving resonance builds a hypnotic ambience as the music and the exchanges of phrases between voices grow slower, rising with considerably greater angst as the first part winds out. The second half, referencing divine retribution, is slower. more tersely focused, and also more immersively haunting as it goes on. It is a shock this music hasn’t been recorded before.

There are a handful of other, shorter Peñalosa compositions and excerpts from masses here as well. Texts from his Missa L’homme armé, based on a folk melody popular at the time, offer warner, hypnotically circling harmonies, stirring plainchant-inflected cadences, and benedictory resolution.

The album also includes a pair of works by a somewhat later Spanish composer, Francisco Guerrero: a wavelike 1555 setting from the Song of Songs and a brief, rousing vernacular work from 1598.

Tragedy and Transcendence with the Choir and Orchestra of St. Ignatius Loyola

The high point of the Mozart Requiem, as generations of concertgoers and fans of biopics know well, comes midway through the mass where Mozart realizes that he’s going to die. A cynic would say that Mozart, ever the egotist, saved his best for a self-penned obituary, but the music transcends that. It’s horrifying without being macabre, one of the most chilling existential moments in the classical repertoire. Wednesday night, in the wondrous sonics of their Upper East Side home base, the massive Choir and Orchestra of St. Ignatius Loyola left the audience literally gasping when they reached that moment. Getting there was almost as intense and thrilling. Despite the fact that much of the crowd was obviously familiar with the work, people were exchanging stunned glances in amazement at its angst-ridden power and the ensemble’s pinpoint, precise command of it.

Hearing the orchestra and 37-piece choir up close reminded what a hodgepodge it is – and how difficult it is to perform, with all the dynamic shifts, Mozart’s shivery strings and elegant foreboding up against Franz Sussmayr’s pedestrianly pleasant passages added after Mozart’s death to complete the work as a fullscale Catholic mass. But music director K. Scott Warren and his mighty group were up to the challenge, the explosive vocal bursts of the towering Dies Irae passage giving way to the pensively dancing Andante and then the ever-present, achingly imploring Rex Tremendae section on the way up to the central crescendo. The soloists – soprano Tami Petty, mezzo-soprano Sara Murphy, tenor John Tiranno and bass-baritone Kevin Deas all stepped up with power and steely focus when their moments arrived.

Getting to the Mozart was a lot of fun too. The concert opened with baroque composer Heinrich Schutz’ remarkably forward-looking, tersely elegaic Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ, a partita for chamber ensemble and fifteen-voice choir plus soloists. Standouts among the performers included but were not limited to baritone Elliott Carlton Hines, with his gretty, plaintive edge; Elisa Singer, whose soprano delivered spine-tingling range and power; contralto Heather Petrie, who dazzled with her split-second ability to shift between registers; and tenor Steven Caldicott Wilson, who raised the ante with equal parts color and poignancy.

And the fun maxed out with an unrestrained, joyous performance of Bach’s Jesu, Meine Freude, BWV 227. This piece is a little more straightforward than the typical Bach cantata, which allowed for the group to make an unselfconsciously dancing hymn out of it; that might sound like an oxymoron, but in this group’s hands it seemed perfectly natural and impossible to resist, through a stiletto staccato fugue, lilting sways, mellifluous volleys of arpeggios, a bit of a bittersweet nocturne and then its concluding ode to joy. Throughout this piece and the rest of the concert, the sound was seamless yet balanced to a minute degree, keening highs against brooding lows, awash in lustre and rapture, further enhanced by cathedral’s magnificent sonics.

A Parade of Jazz and Classical Talent Showcases the Sonics at Subculture

There was no need for the parade of musicians on the bill this evening at Subculture to do anything more than phone in their performances. After all, they were only there to give a by-invite-only audience of media and a few friends an idea of how both amplified and unamplified acts sound in the newly renovated space. But they did far more than that: if the quality of most of these artists is an indication of what the venue will be booking in the coming months, that’s something to look forward to. And the sonics here are exquisite, to rival the Village Vanguard and Carnegie Hall: Subculture has quietly vaulted to the ranks of Manhattan’s top-tier listening rooms.

On the unamplified side, a-cappella quartet New York Polyphony – Christopher Dylan Herbert, Craig Phillips, Geoffrey Williams and Steven Caldicott Wilson – blended voices richly and intricately in pre-baroque Palestrina motets and then with a slyly joyous new arrangement of Rosie the Riveter. The up-and-coming ACJW String Quartet – Grace Park, Clara Lyon, John Stulz and Hannah Collins – made energetic work of a Philip Glass excerpt and then took what could have been Schubert’s String Quartet No. 12 – if Schubert had finished writing it – to the next level. The famous nocturnal theme became a suspenseful springboard for animated, even explosive cadenzas, a mystery unfolding with an increasing sense of triumph. Student ensembles can be erratic, but they also bring fresh ears and ideas to a performance and this was a prime example of that kind of confluence.

On the more groove-oriented side, pianist/chanteuse Laila Biali sang her driving, playful new arrangement of This Could Be the Start of Something New with Joel Frahm on tenor sax, Ike Sturm on bass and Jared Schonig on drums. The highlight of the night, unsurprisingly, was pianist Fred Hersch, who delivered an understatedly bittersweet, strolling blend of ragtime-tinged pastoral shades on Down Home, his homage to Bill Frisell (with whom he collaborated memorably about fifteen years ago), a standout track from Hersch’s new live album, Flying Free, with guitarist Julian Lage. Singer Jo Lawry then joined Hersch and over lush, glimmering, Debussy-esque cascades, delivered a biting, half-sung, half-narrated reflection on clueless parades of tourists in the Louvre crowding around to take pics and videos of the Mona Lisa – and then moving on. The two wound up their brief set, joined by Richie Barshay on hand drum, for an electrically dancing, animatedly conversational take of the new album’s bossa-flavored title track, an Egberto Gismonti tribute.