Various Composers - Stabat (Graham Ross)

Information

1. Arvo Pärt - Da pacem, Domine
2. Pēteris Vasks - The Woman with the Alabaster Box
3. Pēteris Vasks - Plainscapes
4. Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
5. Arvo Pärt - Nunc dimittis
6. James MacMillan - Miserere
7. Arvo Pärt - Stabat Mater

Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
The Dmitri Ensemble
Graham Ross, conductor

Date: 2020
Label: Harmonia Mundi
http://www.harmoniamundi.com/#!/albums/2594

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review

This is a focused and absorbing programme, splicing choral works by Pärt with Vasks’s Plainscapes and MacMillan’s Magnificat. It finds the Clare College Choir a long way from its boxy, enunciation-sharpening home acoustic (the listed venues are Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel and All Hallows, Gospel Oak), which must have been liberating but poses a whole new set of questions. The highlight is Pärt’s 27-minute Stabat mater, whose meditative arc roots both singers and players more into a form of collective expression, one that strikes a workable deal between solemnity and event and which uses the acoustic respectfully to its advantage.

Perhaps the more consistent tone there comes, in part, from the fact that the SAT scoring draws the tenors up into a lighter, higher place than down the other way; in The Woman with the Alabaster Box and elsewhere (and in the Stabat’s ‘Fac ut portem’) the male singers can upset the balance and curdle the blend, particularly in the big chords of the MacMillan, where the ensemble sounds most like a small student chapel choir relying on a reverberant acoustic for assistance (and the male singers ham up the chants where the female ones don’t).

The choir shows the best of its blends in Pärt’s clean, triadic architecture – sopranos on point in the Magnificat, with clear colours from the whole ensemble in the Nunc dimittis (and a breathtaking depiction of the work’s sudden shard of blazing light) and real meaning in the gentle undulation, kept in check, of Da pacem, Domine. Drones are pure and steady; cloud-like chords are placed surely but atmospherically in the acoustic’s recessed spaces. But the acoustic set-up of Vasks’s Plainscapes is frustrating, the far horizon weakened by the close proximity of the strings, which cruelly renders the violin solo workaday. The climax is also far more effective and structurally fitting when delivered more firmly but less frenzied. But while there might be more authoritative performances of each of these works available, nowhere are they ranged as thoughtfully on disc as here.

-- Andrew Mellor, Gramophone

More reviews:
https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/choral-song/stabat/
https://theclassicreview.com/album-reviews/review-stabat-part-macmillan-vasks-ross/
https://www.allmusic.com/album/stabat-arvo-p%C3%A4rt-peteris-vasks-james-macmillan-mw0003352990

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Graham Ross (born 29 April 1985) is a British conductor and composer. He studied composition with Giles Swayne at Clare College, Cambridge, and conducting with Peter Stark and Robin O'Neill at London's Royal College of Music. In 2004 he co-founded The Dmitri Ensemble, a performing group based around a string ensemble, of which he is Principal Conductor. Since 2010, Ross has directed the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, with whom he has toured across Europe, the United States of America, Asia and Australia. As a composer, Ross has written over one hundred works for a wide variety of genres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Ross_(musician)
http://www.grahamross.com/

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FLAC, tracks

Links in comment

Enjoy!