October 17th, 2004

:: Listen ::

:: Pledge ::

Playlists

Click here for a listing of the songs heard daily on KBAQ.

Shakespeare in Song

Shakespeare in Song
Bach Choir finds magic in Bard's songs

Kenneth LaFave
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 17, 2004 12:00 AM

--Kenneth Lafave, Arizona Republic

The Phoenix Bach Choir has broken through the wall that keeps local artists from achieving international stature, and it has done so in spectacular fashion. Artistic director/conductor Charles Bruffy came up with an idea so obvious it's amazing it hadn't been done before: Create a compact disc devoted entirely to choral settings of texts from Shakespeare.

The result, Shakespeare in Song (on the Chandos label), soared to the Top 20 in classical discs on Amazon.uk in Britain when it was released over the summer. The choir is awaiting reports on U.S. sales; the disc was released here late last month.

Shakespeare in Song is our Arizona Republic-KBAQ Classical CD of the Week, and not because this is a local group. The disc is a fascinating journey through the minds of eight composers, some famous, some unknown, as they endeavor to cradle some of the best-known words in the English language in melodies and harmonies befitting them. advertisement

There are potentially as many settings of any given text as there are composers to interpret them. For example, "Full fathom five" from The Tempest receives three different settings. That of the 20th-century Swiss modernist Frank Martin is dark and grieving. Ralph Vaughan Williams' is awash in a sonic picture of the sea. And a new one by the Finnish composer Jaakko Mantyjarvi is weighted with mystery.

Living American composer Matthew Harris, who has set dozens of the Bard's texts to music, is represented by a bouquet of seven that opens this lustrously produced recording. (The format is CD/SACD, pushing the retail price to $23 on Amazon.com.) His strongest suit is finding unlikely ways to inject rhythmic variety into the words. "When daffodils begin to peer" from A Winter's Tale is a rollicking, Smokey Mountains-tinted binge of vocal color. Another American contributes a hushed and eerie meditation on "When he shall die" from Romeo and Juliet.

There are two one-shot numbers from the Swede Nils Lindberg and Englishman Alan Murray that are brief, memorable and lovely. From Pulitzer Prize-winner Dominick Argento comes a strange, dark setting of a Shakespeare sonnet, composed after 9/11 because of the line "lofty towers I see down-razed."

For my money, the four songs by Mantyjarvi are the richest find of the lot. Each is an imaginative piece of tone painting, from the crushing chord on the word "death" in "Come away, death" to the vocal slitherings of "You spotted snakes" from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Reviews from England emphasized the "freshness" of the Phoenix Bach Choir sound, and I can only assume that this means the open, "American" sound of the vowels. Even better is Bruffy's way of making every phrase tell, and each phrase connect to the next. Add to this rock-solid pitch a depth and lucidity of texture and sheer energetic commitment, and you have a disc to make any singer - from anywhere on the globe - proud.

Hear excerpts sundays at noon on 89.5 KBAQ, the same day the review is published in the Republic. CD of the Week is now in Sunday's A&E section.

Set Player | Permanent link | Email Story