SOUNDS OF AMERICA

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Lots of fun and mildly addictive: the Janoska Ensemble let their hair down in style – see review on page V

its single span was derived from an incident in Xiaoxiang province during the Cultural Revolution when a widow haunted the official who murdered her husband by wailing in despair from the forest. Her cries suffuse the solo part but find echoes in the orchestral texture as well.

Liang thinks of himself as a painter in sound and refers to his use of a ‘sonic brush’. His idiom is a fusion of Chinese and Western – if not exactly tonally based, still rooted in appealing euphony. This is most evident in the two companion (and longer) works. Five Seasons originated in 2010 as a quintet for pipa – the Chinese lute – and string quartet but the composer arranged its five movements (‘Dew-Drop’; ‘Water Play’; ‘Cicada Chorus’; ‘Leaves-Fall’; ‘Drumming’) for string orchestra in 2014. The concerto also nods in expression to the five elements – wood, fire, metal, water and earth – colouring the textures in each movement.

In A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams (written in 2017 specifically for BMOP) Liang’s tonal and textural palettes become ever more exquisite, ranging from sonorities at the edge of silence in ‘Healing Rain Drops’ to fullorchestral might describing the shredding of landscapes. Liang’s Chinese-inflected sound world is never less than fascinating and always deeply involving. The BMOP navigate their way through his precisely calculated sonorities with aplomb and accuracy. The engineering copes with the extremes of the dynamic range superbly. Guy Rickards

Palestrina Missa Tu es Petrus. Canite tuba. Caro mea. Improperium expectavit. Sicut cervus. Surrexit pastor bonus. Tu es Petrus. The Choir of St Luke in the Fields / David Shuler MSR Classics F MS1698 (64’ • DDD • T/t)

This radiant new Palestrina recital from the Greenwich Village-based Choir of St Luke in the Fields commands tonal beauty and emotional flow that has a personal feel. This may be because the context in which Palestrina wrote his hundreds of Masses and motets still exists today: a need for timeless music that shines light upon the soul, as human blueprints are turned miraculously into sanctified sound.

Led by David Shuler, director of music and organist at St Luke’s since gramophone.co.uk

1988, the 14-member choir move naturally with a pleasant dynamic range and a gentle colour palette. The waves of music they produce sound like they were designed to be performed for papal audiences in St Peter’s. These performances are concerned more with the warmth of human dialogue – with blending lines rather than maintaining their integrity – and less with achieving spiritual purity by being historically rigorous. I wonder which approach would have been more likely to persuade Cardinal Borromeo that Palestrina’s music belonged in the church.

The warm, spacious recordings – made not at St Luke’s in the West Village but at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in midtown Manhattan – provide an audiophile display of Palestrina’s vivid writing. The blending of the voices halfway through Tu es Petrus is quite astonishing. In Sicut cervus, as the choir relaxes into deeper regions of sound and dimension, the microphones capture the women with an especially lovely bloom.

John Bradley’s beautifully written booklet notes reminds us further that this music was at the service of words that were meant for listeners to reflect on. Laurence Vittes

GRAMOPHONE JUNE 2019 III