Rias Kammerchor Wolfgang Rihm Astralis & Other Choral Works

Saul is one of Handel's most action-filled, fast-moving oratorios; an opera in everything but name only. It has been lucky on disc–both Paul McCreesh (Archiv) and John Eliot Gardiner (Philips) have led superb readings, and Joachim Carlos Martini leads a good performance on Naxos, which is a bargain. Now René Jacobs and his remarkable Concerto Köln come along and offer a truly majestic reading, filled with real drama and beautiful, precise singing and playing. Tenor Jeremy Ovenden sings Jonathan with nobility and faces down Saul in Act II with style and power. David is sung by countertenor Lawrence Zazzo, and he's as good as the best-recorded competition (Andreas Scholl, Derek Lee Ragin). Emma Bell is ravishing as Merab; Rosemary Joshua makes a fine Joshua.

Tutuguri: Poème dansé, after Artaud, is obliquely inspired by Artaud’s poem Tutuguri – Le rite du soleil noir in his radiophonic "play" Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu of 1948 as well as by Artaud’s life and work in general. Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948), actor, playwright and stage director, was once a member of the French surrealist circle which he left when he realised the Surrealists’ Communist leanings. From early on, he suffered from nervous and mental disorders, often cured by various drugs to which he remained addicted throughout his life.

The intensely practical choral music of the young Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds is steadily gaining appreciation across the world. The works on this new album owe their genesis to commissions from the United States, England and northern Europe and encompass ethereal expressions of uniquely arctic phenomena (listen for wine glasses turned—and tuned—to wondrously simple but devastating effect within the choral texture), American ballads and several works in the ‘Anglican tradition’, the fruits of the composer’s recent residency at Trinity College Cambridge. Trinity College Choir Cambridge here returns the compliment, as it were, with superlative performances of these varied and engaging works, all recorded under the watchful eye of the composer and conductor Stephen Layton.

I have been a big fan of Estonian music for a while now, and, comparing these pieces with Sumera’s symphonies and chamber music, I was pleasantly surprised by an even greater expressive freedom in his choral writing. Estonia has a very strong vocal tradition, and Sumera’s work on this CD engages very much with a direct, sometimes even confrontational manner of communicating text, though without quite the blood, sweat, iron and tears of Tormis.

Dominy Clements @ musicweb-international