Notes on the album

I have known the many fine recordings by the Latvian Radio Choir for some years, especially those of Baltic composers. I worked with the choir for the first time in 2003 when I was guest composer at the Arena Festival in Riga and my first contribution was a choral concert with them in the very beautiful St John’s Church (where most of these recordings were made). I realized as I worked closely with them that this is probably one of the finest choirs in the world today and I was able to experience at first hand the extraordinary beauty of its choral sound, the precision of its ensemble, the perfection of its intonation, the subtlety of its phrasing, as well as the striking individuality of its soloists.

And So Ended Kant’s Travelling In This World and Three Poems of Cecco Angiolieri – were written for the entire group of tutors and students when I was composer in residence at the Hilliard Ensemble’s summer school in 1997.  The text for the first is taken from Thomas de Quincey's The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, a work that I have had in mind for operatic treatment for many years. As the students on the course, many of whom were professional singers, were drawn from all over the world I felt that it would useful to write something in English, almost as an exercise in diction, but to focus at the same time on their qualities as singers of early music. The piece is for five-part choir - with the basses been given a low C on the final chord. The text describes Kant's last journey, a futile and inconclusive visit to a friend in the country.

I came across the poetry of Cecco Angiolieri by chance. Two Italian friends began to declaim a curious thirteenth century poem after dinner at the restaurant in Venice owned by one of them. The poem that I heard comprised 10 sentences each beginning "S'i' fosse..." followed by a response. As it happened there were nine student groups at the summer school plus the five vocal tutors giving 10 groups in all (effectively 49 solo voices). This formed the second section of the piece. Throughout the performance each group is located in a different part of the church, with the sound gradually moving around so that the tutti fills the whole church. For the first poem, I used the singers in different combinations of pairs of groups. For the last poem the setting is more traditionally choral, though in 7 parts, with the 5-part tutorial group separate from them. This group begins and ends the third section with a short and poignant text that I had found on a grave in the Protestant section of the San Michele cemetery, and which serves to punctuate the verses and to form a coda. The piece is dedicated to the Corte Sconta in Venice.

On Photography is the earliest work of mine for choir and was written in 1983 as part of the work I did with Robert Wilson on his large-scale operatic project The CIVIL WarS. Although the piece was rehearsed and prepared for recording by the choir of South German Radio, it was never performed due to the collapse of the overall project. Until 1994 the manuscript was lost - I eventually found it behind a filing cabinet as I was clearing my office having given up university teaching. The choice of text and subject matter was mine and is loosely connected to my love of the work of Jules Verne. I knew that Verne had met Pope Leo XIII in 1884 (a hundred years before our work was due to reach fruition) and that Leo XIII had written a poem Ars Photographica in praise of photography (a modern subject using an archaic language, Latin) when he was still Cardinal Pecci in Perugia in 1867. As it happened, the writer Susan Sontag was considering joining the project and we spoke together several times. I knew, of course, that one of her first major books was on photography, and this led me to set Leo's text almost as a way of welcoming her on to the team. The final section consists of a brief Latin epitaph. The instrumental accompaniment of the longer central section  (piano and harmonium) reflected the fact that I had then recently played the harmonium part in Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle.

For the first time on GB Records I decided to include composers other than myself. This came about because of my work with the choir and from a particular incident. In our first concert in Riga the choir sang in two different formations – as it does here: one large ensemble of almost 50 voices for Three Poems of Cecco Angiolieri and one medium ensemble of about 24 voices, their usual complement, for And So Ended Kant’s Travelling In This World. I went to the rehearsal in the afternoon of the concert arriving about twenty minutes early for the rehearsal of the larger piece. I sat in a pew and the choir started to sing the piece they were rehearsing before mine. It was something I did not know but I thought it was the most beautiful music I had ever heard. I sat still, completely overwhelmed by the richness of its harmonies, by its serenity and by the way in which it evolved – slowly but inevitably with the harmonic movement anchored by low basses. I learned that it was by the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, and that it was one of the very few pieces of choral music that he had written. It is called Diptychon and sets the Lord’s Prayer (in Russian) for the first part, and a poem, “Testament”, by a 19-century Ukrainian poet Tarass Shevchenko for the second. I resolved at that moment to include this music on the recording and enable it to be heard more widely.

Subsequently I decided to add another piece by a composer other than myself, an extraordinary work by the Latvian composer Arturs Maskats. Like the Silvestrov, this is a religious work and sets verses from Psalm 141. Like the Silvestrov, it involves considerable use of divisi within the choir as well as an incredible pitch range from low basses (octavists) to an other worldly soprano voice humming an octave above the rest of the ensemble. Getting to know Latvian and other Baltic composers has been one the pleasures and privileges of working with the choir and I now have a lively working relationship, and strong personal friendship, with its two great conductors Kaspars Putnins and Sigvards Klava.

Gavin Bryars

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