Customer Reviews

Accentus: Transcriptions

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I concur with the previous reviewer. Accentus has surpassed all their previous releases here. In particular, the performance of the Mahler Adagietto (from Symphony No. 5) is heart-rending and technically astonishing, as solo sopranos and mezzos take on the lines of different strings. There is not a bad cut in the lot, though the Barber Agnus Dei is becoming one of the most overrecorded pieces in the catalog. The recorded sound is clearest when one plays the CD at moderate volume. There is, with only one or two exceptions, no loss of dynamic range. While I noticed some roll-off distortion during a few forte passages, reducing the volume minimizes the problem. Naive has one of the most daring and consistently tasteful catalogues in the business, and this Accentus album is a great introduction to the label, and to a choir that has created the most distinctive technique of any I've heard in my lifetime.

Accentus is a French a cappella choir of 32 voices founded and directed by Laurence Equilbey in 1991; on the basis of this recording I'd warrant that she is a superb choir builder and director. I'd heard wonderful things about them but had never heard anything they'd recorded. Here we have a collection of transcriptions of pieces originally written for instruments (or instruments and solo voice) sung impeccably. The only problem is that at high dynamic levels there tends to be some distortion; I played the disc on four different playback setups and got the distortion each time. A real pity.

As to the performances themselves, they are nothing short of sensational. The program starts with Barber's own transcription of his 'Adagio for Strings' (itself a transcription of a movement from his string quartet) to the words of the Agnus dei. Then we have an impressive and moving choral setting by Gérard Pesson of the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony; it is set to words of August von Platen.

There are two Chopin transcriptions by Franck Krawczyk: 'Lacrimosa,' from the Op. 10, No. 6 Etude, and 'Lulajze, Jezuniu' ('Sleep, little Jesus') set to the Largo from Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 58. They are both quite beautiful.

The main transcriber on this disc is Clytus Gottwald, who transcribed six other pieces including Ravel's 'Soupir,' Wolf's 'Die verlassene Mägdlein' and 'Auf ein altes Bild,' Berg's 'Die Nachtigall,' Debussy's 'Les Angelus.' He tends to use the overlapping choral technique pioneered by Gyorgy Ligeti which creates a kind of aural haze. This is very effective in the impressionistic pieces (and in the second of the Wolf songs), much less so in the German transcriptions. Least successful, by far, is the transcription by Gottwald of 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen' from Mahler's Rückert-Lieder, which, no matter how beautifully sung, becomes a muddy mess obscuring both the melody line and the words.

Finally, there is a gorgeous piece based on Bach's 'Komm, süsser Tod' ('Come, sweet death') transcribed by the Norwegian master, Knut Nystedt. It, the Barber and the Mahler Adagietto are, for me, the high points of this fascinating disc.

A word about this terrific choir. They sing with a distinctively French sound--that is to say, with clarity, lightness, absolute purity of sound--and their dynamic range has to be heard to be believed. The tonal core does not waver or spread even at the softest dynamic or the extremes of vocal range and, in spite of the distortion in the recording, one can hear that they never produce an ugly tone even at their loudest. I am eager to hear more of their recordings and, who knows, maybe even hear them perform in person some day.

Scott Morrison

I first heard a selection (Mahler's Adagietto) from this CD on the radio, and I had to buy it. This music is some of the most beautiful I have ever heard (and I have many years' experience as a pianist, organist, and opera and choral singer). I first loved the aforementioned Adagietto, but have later come to relish even more the second Malher piece on the CD; I use it during meditation, and it takes me to a deep, peaceful, spiritual place. Also, the Ravel piece Soupir ("sigh") is just beyond words--the colorings of the vocal expression, the seamless blend of this ensemble. It's like butter!! I do not know if this ensemble has other recordings, but I would snatch them up as soon as I found out about them. However, to be balanced, the inner selections on the CD, tracks 6,7, and 8, while intricate and well performed, do not rise to the heights of the others I mentioned. But then, how often does one like every cut on an album?

Some times, one must simply lay down one's defenses (e.g. one's critical sense) and give oneself entirely to the beauty of the music. This is a typical chart-breaker, another Hildegarde von Bingen type of hit. Classical music for the illeterate masses? No, the kind that you want to offer your friends at Christmas - even if they ARE amateurs and cognoscenti of classical music.

The two opening pieces - originally Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings and the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony, the latter made famous beyond the public of classical music by its use in the film of Lucchino Visconti "Death in Venice" - are beautiful of course, among the great warhorses of collections of orchestral encores, but the arrangements sung by Laurence Equilbey's chamber chorus Accentus are equally beautiful, and illuminating, elegiac and intense, with the a cappella chorus functioning, really, as a vocal orchestra. You'd think Barber and Mahler had first written their respective piece for chorus, and only later adapted it for orchestra - which, in the case of Barber, isn't s far from what happened, since he penned himself the choral arrangement of the Adagio, under the form of an Agnus Dei, in 1967, more than thirty years after the original piece (the composition for string orchestra by which the Adagio is most famous being itself an arrangement of the slow movement of his string quartet). But it was brilliant also of French composer/arranger Gérard Pesson to follow that model and set Mahler's Adagietto not for wordless chorus, but on a text ("prima la musica poi le parole", first the music then the lyrics, a process known in Jazz as "vocalese", in classical music as "pasticcio", in the Middle Ages, says Pesson, as "tropos logogenos, and today as post-synchronization). Pesson's choice of text (provided by French musicologist and radio host Martin Kaltenecker) is equally brilliant: a collage of poems by the German early 19th Century German poet August von Platen - von Platen was, with Mahler, the model for Thomas Mann when he wrote the character of Gustav Eschenbach in Death in Venice, and Mahler's adagietto became an instant hit when it was used by Visconti in his cinematographic adaptation of Mann's novel (in which he changed Gustav Eschenbach, which Mann had made a writer, back into a composer): so using the texts of von Platen in the arrangement of the Mahler music which was used in the cinematographic adaptation of the novel which was inspired by both von Platel and Mahler, really completes the circle.

We are not told anything about the arrangements, by French composer Frank Krawczyk, of Chopin's Etude op. 10/6 and Largo from the Third Piano Sonata, but Krawczyk follows the same principle as Barber and Pesson, adding words to the music: Lacrimosa, and a lullaby in what I assume is Polish, Lulajzé Jezuniu, Sleep little Jesus. The result, even in Lacrimosa, is more earthly than Barber and Mahler.

The arrangements of various songs for a cappella chorus by the great chorus master Clytus Gottwald use of course the words of the original songs. In an explanatory note, Gottwald says that he got the idea after he and his ensemble had premiered Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, and as a result of his reflecting that "the choral music of the twentieth century had been unable to keep pace with the tumultuous development of instrumental music", and that there lacked "a late Romantic-Impressionist a cappella literature rising to the same level as the instrumental music of that same period". So he made his arrangements of songs of that era - Soupir from Ravel's avant-garde Trois poèmes de Mallarmé for soprano and chamber ensemble, two by Hugo Wolf from Mörike-Lieder, Die Nachtigall from Berg's Seven Early Songs, Mahler's Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, one of the most moving songs from his from Rückert-Lieder, and one by Debussy, about ringing church bells - as if those composers had already known the compositional techniques of Ligeti (and that includes some whistling at the end of Ravel). The choral songs are fascinating and soothing (and, mind you, nowhere as frightening as Ligeti's Lux Aeterna), but truth is, other maybe than the beautiful and heavenly Soupir of Ravel, they and those of Krawczyk come as an emotional relief after the intensity of the Adagio and Adagietto, and of Knut Nystedt's "Immortal Bach".

Nystedt, born in 1915 and still living, is a Norvegian composer of choral and orchestral music. As with Krawczyk, we aren't told anything about the composer or his piece, an arrangement of Bach's Komm süsser Tod (Come Sweet Death, a song for solo voice and basso from the 69 Songs and Arias contributed by Bach for Schemelli's geistliches Gesangbuch), but apparently (and understandably) it is a choral hit, judging from the number of posts on You Tube. The arrangement is suffocatingly beautiful - or maybe I should write that the way Equilbey has it sung is suffocatingly beautiful. Nystedt has written his arrangement piling strata of conjunct semi-tones, so that the text (and he retains only the first two lines of the song) becomes drowned under its own resonance. But I went on You Tube to check on other performances, and apparently Equilbey emphasizes that process, not just by taking a very slow, time-suspended tempo, but by inverting the two parts of the choral piece, playing first the "blurred" part that Nystedt had positioned second, and second the part where the lines are clearly sung. And obviously that was done, not at the recording, but in the editing room: you can hear the splice, at 5:22. I guess that kind of score doctoring should call for raised eyebrows, but it is supremely effective, hypnotic and other-worldly, as if the words from Bach's song ("Come, sweet death, come, blessed rest, come lead me to peace) were resonating under water, or from the living to the unknown place where float the spirit of the dead.

Great pieces, great arrangements - and the singing. I don't know, maybe some English choral groups will have more other-worldly purity than Accentus here, more all-environing timbral silkiness, more intensity, and if so I hope they pick up and record Pesson-Mahler's Adagietto and Nystedt's Bach. Harry Christophers and The Sixteen - a typical English A Cappella group - have recorded Barber's Agnus Dei (Barber: Agnus Dei (An American Collection)); Accentus is more flowing and supple, which I find preferable, and more homogeneous in the climax. Their Barber, Mahler/Pesson and Bach/Nystedt are elegiac, intense, mesmerizing. The soprano's stratospheric leaps in Adagio (1:14) and Adagietto (4:15) were stabs at my heart, and so was the beautifully mahlerian contralto solo in Adagietto (from 1:03).

Laurence Equilbey's chamber chorus Accentus is making a specialty of looking at familiar music in different ways, such as their piano-only versions of the Brahms Requiem and Dvorak Stabat Mater. In this collection, the term "transcriptions" covers a variety of a capella arrangements of pieces better known in other forms. Barber's own choral edition of his famous Adagio ("Agnus Dei," to words from the Mass) simply reassigns the instrumental lines to the voices; in the makeover of a Chopin etude into "Lacrymosa," the rocking movement of the left-hand keyboard figure is provided by the singers instead. At the other extreme, Knut Nystedt's "Immortal Bach" retains the melodic line of "Komm, susser Tod" and little else, outfitting it in contemporary harmonies. All the selections are performed with the accuracy and style we expect from this group. Texts are provided, as well as interesting notes by the arrangers on the how and why.