The American Record Guide - January/February 2006
PENITENTIA: ancient petitions for mercy and peace
Lindsay Koob
I’m hardly surprised to add yet another excellent choir to my list of top ensembles native to Seattle, the home of quite a vibrant choral scene. The Esoterics, led by Yale-educated Eric Banks, offers here a beautifully sung program of choice a cappella picks from six composers of the 20th Century.
Poulenc’s Four motets for a time of penitence – composed on the brink of WWII – are well-established masterpieces, but Ildebrando Pizzetti’s imploring Three choral compositions (written at the height of Italy’s fascist madness) are nearly as impressive. I’ve never heard John Joubert’s three Pro pace motets, from some of the cold war’s chilliest years, and am pleased to discover these impassioned choral pleas for peace. Music of later vintage begins with the two pungent movements of Precatio pro pace, a 1975 work by Hungarian composer Miklos Paszti. Geert D’hollander – the Belgian carilloneur, teacher of campanology (the theory and history of bell-making), and composer – wrote the small celestial jewels called Three nocturnes in 1991. The most recent composition heard here – the Seven last words by Bern Herbolsheimer – may, after the Poulenc, be the most memorable. I reviewed this and other wonderful choral music from him in January/February 2005. Composed on the cusp of the new millennium, it is one of the most radiant and searching musical treatments of the last words I know. Watch for the work of this rare musical mystic: he’s one of America’s very finest choral writers.
This is a truly outstanding choir, with solid singers in every section supporting an especially pure and plangent contingent of sopranos. They are capable of sonorous warmth as well as the icy transparency of tone that is essential if a choir is to achieve the kind of needlepoint intonation that many modern composers demand. Mr Banks knows how to get any mood, emotion, or effect out of his singers. I even noticed a certain astringent “Gallic edge’ to their voices in the Poulenc, as if to underscore the cheeky wit and sarcasm that often pervade even his greatest music. And this is truly one of the better all-modern choral collections I’ve heard lately. Even if unaccompanied 20th-century choral music is not your thing, don’t hesitate to give this a try: it just might make a convert of you.