Home. Eric Whitacre/VOCES8 (CD Review)

by Karl Nehring

Whitacre: Go, Lovely Rose; The Seal Lullaby; Sing Gently; All Seems Beautiful to Me; The Sacred Veil. VOCES8 (Andrea Haines, Molly Noon, soprano; Katie Jeffries-Harris, Barnaby Smith [Artistic Director], alto; Blake Morgan, Evan Williamson, tenor; Sam Poppleton - except [*], Christopher Moore, baritone; Jonathan Pacey, bass); Emma Denton, cello; Christopher Glenn, piano; Eric Whitacre, conductor. Decca 483 3970

 

The American composer and conductor Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) is one of those musicians whose work always seems to be overflowing with energy, imagination, and beauty. His style is a blending of the simple and the complex, with melodies and harmonies that are often beguiling and straightforward on the surface but then as the music continues, reveal depth and breadth express of both harmony and melody that extend deep, wide, and high. His energy does not confine itself to his composing, as he also is active as a conductor. With the advent of the internet and technologies for interacting electronically, he has been active in assembling “virtual choirs” that feature singers from throughout the world joyfully blending their voices under his direction and stewardship, an effort that paid has great artistic and cultural dividends by creating new friendships as well as beautiful music. VOCES8 is an English vocal octet originally founded in 2003. They have had numerous personnel changes over the years, but have remained consistent in their overall sound. They have appeared on numerous recordings over the past couple of decades, not only in supporting roles, as on composer Christopher Tin’s The Lost Birds (reviewed here), but also as featured performers, such as their 2021 Decca release, Infinity (reviewed here). 

 

On this new Decca release, Whitacre and VOCES8 have joined together to present several of the composer’s works. Their mutual admiration is evident in the liner notes. “It is one thing to spend years savoring the immaculate recordings of one of your all-time favorite vocal groups. It is quite another thin g to be standing in. front of them, making music together in the same room. There is, of course, that legendary VOCES8 sound. Glassy and pure, like spun honey. It’s overwhelming at first, because the way they sing together is so beautiful, so blended,” writes Whitacre. “We are delighted we had the chance to work with Eric on this album,” writes Barnaby Smith (Artistic Director of VOCES8). “To welcome him to the VOCES8 Centre in London to direct his music in what was both a relaxed, but intensely artistically and emotionally charged atmosphere was something very special.” 

 

The album begins with four brief pieces, all of which are under five minutes in length, beginning with Go, Lovely Rose, Whitacre’s first composition, followed by one of his most frequently performed pieces, The Seal Lullaby, which was written to accompany an animated film that never actually got produced – but the lovely music lives on. The next song, Sing Gently was composed during COVID-19 lockdown specially for Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, made up of more than 17,500 singers from 124 different countries. The fourth work on the album is Whitacre’s most recent composition, All Seems Beautiful to Me, based on a poem by Walt Whitman (from Song of the Open Road) celebrating the human spirit’s capacity for generosity and growth. It was commissioned by the United States Air Force Band and here receives its world premiere recording. We then arrive at the album’s main attraction, The Sacred Veil, which Whitacre composed along with his friend and frequent collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri, who wrote most of the lyrics, which revolve around the death from cancer of his late wife, Julia Lawrence Silvestri (the remainder of the lyrics were written by Whitacre and Ms. Silvestri before her passing). As you might surmise from those circumstances, The Sacred Veil is an intensely personal, deeply moving composition. 

One of the interesting qualities of The Sacred Veil is the way it balances intimacy with expression. The lyrics focus on the deeply private and personal story of Julia’s passing, told from the perspective of her husband, Charles. At the same time, the lyrics are used to evoke Silvestri’s concept of a thin veil that separates the past from the future, the living from the dead, the temporal from the eternal. This idea of the veil may be a fairly straightforward concept intellectually, but as a central part of a lived experience, it is complex and mysterious. Whitacre’s musical setting of the lyrics uses simple melodies played by the piano and the cello to provide a ground for the sometimes straightforward, sometimes highly complex choral parts. Just listen to the opening measures, with a simple melody on the piano soon joined by a tone from the cello, the voices then joining in with some exquisite harmonizing that draws the listener right into the lyrics and thus into the story. By the time the final movements arrive, the vocal harmonies have become more layered, more complex, but the piano and cello still are there to provide a solid foundation for the harmonic structure of the voices. A particularly moving choral device that Whitacre uses to great effect is sliding harmonies in the voices as the lyrics reflect Silvestri’s thoughts and emotions in the immediate aftermath of his wife’s passing in the penultimate movement, “You Rise, I Fall,” an incredibly moving portrait of grief, built upon love and hope.

 

The liner notes reveal a wrinkle about this recording that is worth noting. “Much of Eric’s music had been conceived for larger forces than an eight-voiced vocal group,” notes Barnaby Smith, “so to work with the composer to find the best way to present the scores in this chamber environment was an engaging and invigorating part of our process.” And there you have it – The Sacred Veil was originally conceived for a larger choir. In fact, the first recording of it, which Whitacre himself conducted (reviewed here), featured the larger forces of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. So what we have here in this Decca release is in essence a chamber version of the work. That is not to diminish its value, for VOCES8 does a beautiful job. Comparing the two versions directly, I enjoy the greater warmth and humanity that comes through in the earlier (Los Angeles) version, but there is something to be said for the intimacy and purity of sound of the VOCES8 version, although the voices of the sopranos can be overpowering at times (something I have noted on previous VOCES8 recordings). Both are very well recorded. In all honesty, I find The Sacred Veil to be one of the most moving musical works of the 21^st century, and I highly recommend this new recording. Indeed, I highly recommend both of Whitacre’s recordings of The Sacred Veil.