January meme: Jan 12
skygiants asked me to talk about some music I enjoyed.
That... could be answered in many different ways. I considered talking about West Side Story, which I just saw two weeks ago with my sister and absolutely adored, or the Opera in English recordings which I keep mentioning but have never actually written up properly, or Frank Wildhorn (which skygiants has already written up better than I could ever do), or Loreena McKennitt (which I don't really have much to say about except that I love all her stuff). But I will talk about the three pieces of choral music I sang in my college choir that I love the most.
Os Justi, Bruckner, an incredibly gorgeous motet which is one of my absolute favorite pieces in the entire world. The part at "meditabitur" (and later at "lex Dei") where the sopranos soar up to an A and the altos have the moving line up against the sopranos moving down... is the most gorgeous thing I have ever been privileged to sing. (And the last page: the gentleness of "in corde, corde," and then the hushed triple pianissimo of "et non supplantabuntur gressus ejus" with the basses supplying the grounding of the low F's -- wow.)
(The translation is "The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks what is just. The law of his God is in his heart, and his feet do not falter." I... have no idea how Bruckner made this out of that.)
Click to view(Please don't listen to this quietly on crappy computer speakers like I just tried to do. Crappy headphones, okay.)
The Coolin, or more precisely Reincarnations, Op. 16: III. The Coolin, Samuel Barber. This is the most sensual piece of music I have ever performed, period. It reminds me of being tenderly and sensually in love, in all the good ways.
The following recording I like except for the way they flat a third of the way through (of course, given how much we flatted this in my college choir, I have no grounds to talk):
(For those of you with Spotify, I like the Dale Warland Singers version.)
And then there's Ein Deutches Requiem, Brahms, which is Brahms setting a bunch of Biblical texts to music while firmly declining to make it Christian-theology-specific (Wikipedia informs me that in performance they inserted some stuff from Handel's Messiah to make it palatable to the clergy, which I think is hilarious). We combined with the other college choirs for this one, and brought in ringers, and it was awesome. We all also have a ton of fond memories of our conductor's odd sayings on this one -- for example, there was the part where "the tenors help the basses, the altos help the tenors, the sopranos help the altos, and God help the sopranos."
Or -- the second movement is one of the most fun choral parts, and it probably says something about me that I can still say in German (albeit with a terrible accent), "For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass." After that, the women come in (and then the men), saying -- and I swear that independent of textual context, the musical line is practically lilting -- "Das Gras ist verdorret, und die Blume abgefallen! (The grass withers, and the flower falls away.) We used to laugh at how cheerful and upbeat the line sounded.
And then, later in the movement: "Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit!!!!!!!" (But the word of the Lord shall endure forever) leading into the totally awesome "Die Erlöseten des Herrn" (The ransomed of the Lord shall return). Okay, the exclamation points were not in the music, but we sang it like they were. Our conductor called it "the biggest BUT in the history of music!"
For the second movement, start at about 10:40 in the following recording. I tend to be partial to Gardiner's conducting of choral music, though I don't like the soloists so much in this one:
This was not one of our favorite movements at the time, because no choral parts, but it is now one of my favorites to listen to, because it is gorgeous. This recording is with Arleen Auger, one of my favorite soprano voices ever.