Synergy Vocals – John Luther Adams: Arctic Dreams (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 43:47 minutes | 468 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Cold Blue Music
Composer John Luther Adams created and honed a distinctively American, rather Ivesian brand of minimalism, with a strong environmentalist bent. Arctic Dreams offers an ideal introduction to his work. It’s in seven movements, all but the last for voices and an ensemble of four string players, retuned and manipulated by electronic delay effects that make them sound like a much larger ensemble. The seven movements depict places and sensations experienced in the Arctic, where Adams spent some years as an environmental researcher, and they’ll be strikingly evocative even for listeners who don’t normally cotton to these kinds of textures. The most minimalist music is reserved for the haunting third movement, “The Circle of Suns and Moons,” which cannot help but bring a picture of the solstices of the far north to the listener’s mind but works equally well as an abstract composition. The four voices intone only intermittently intelligible names of places, plants, birds, weather, and seasons, in Alaskan Native languages, and they have to master non-sung effects that bring quite a bit of difficulty. Synergy Vocals, which has previously specialized in vocal music of Steve Reich, is ideal for this task, and the various engineering layers are cleanly fused by the Cold Blue Music label’s Nathaniel Reichman. Those already attuned to Adams’ unique world will have been awaiting this release; those new to him are recommended to check it out.
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Colin Currie, Colin Currie Group, Synergy Vocals – Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:03 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Colin Currie Records
Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, completed in 1976, is well represented on recordings, including in two versions by Reich himself. Yet there is always room for as fine a performance as this. An examination of a random page in the score for the Music for 18 Musicians might give the impression that it is technically unchallenging, but this is emphatically not true. Percussionist Colin Currie, who leads his Colin Currie Group on this self-released album, has a fortunate metaphor for the work: it is, in his words, “the perfect musical beehive,” and the awesomely complex interactions between its parts are the responsibility of the players. Another way to look at the work is that, despite its large ensemble, it is chamber music, and it demands the rare ability to interact as a string quartet might. The group here delivers impressive results in music that manages to remain lively even as it is precise and transparent; Reich’s chord inversions are clearly audible as they develop and as singers are added to the mix in the persons of the four members of Synergy Vocals (who have worked with Reich before), they are magical. Engineering hounds whom one might quiz about the recording location might fail to identify the Abbey Road Studios in London, but this turns out to be an ideal venue. Those who haven’t heard Reich’s masterpiece for a while are encouraged to check this new version out. – James Manheim
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