Search - Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon :: Nico Muhly: A Good Understanding

A Composer to Hear, To Watch!

Grady Harp | Los Angeles, CA United States | 09/24/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Nico Muhly is a vary young composer, born in Vermont in 1981, who is setting the world on edge with his seemingly endless energy and experimentation with writing music. He was graduated with a degree in English from Columbia University and then obtained his Masters in Music from Juilliard. Having studied with Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano he has been consumed with composition in the last years. He has composed countless works, many of them being regarded highly by both critics and audiences. He provided the haunting score for film 'The Reader' as well as others, and is composing an opera - 'Two Boys' - with Craig Lucas, due for premiere next year. It will be interesting to see how this young talent succeeds in the field of opera: he has enjoyed considerable success with smaller chamber works.



On this CD - A GOOD UNDERSTANDING - he is championed by Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the presentation of eleven works for chorus alone and chorus with instruments. The opening 'Bright Mass with Canons' is a succinct mass format with only the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. The style is suggestive of ancient plainsong chant but with beautifully layered tonal clusters that move effortlessly from section to section in the chorus. This is followed by the 'First Service', a brief eight minute work in two parts - Magnificat and Nunc Dimintis. The 'Senex Pueram Portabat' adds a brass ensemble and inthe composer's words 'I remember singing Byrd's Senex Puerum Portabat as a boy, and freaking out about how beautiful it was. Up to that point, I was a mediocre pianist and a so-so chorister. I remember being so struck by the fluidity of the lines, the relentless lilting rhythm, and the way Byrd both avoided and cradled the text, and decided that a life in music mightn't be the worst thing in the world.' He went on to use the same text for the title piece of the album 'A Good Understanding'.



The most enchanting of the works on this recording is the 'Expecting the Main Things from You' (from poetry by Walt Whitman) best described by the composer as follows:this piece 'begins with a series of exchanges between the choir and ensemble, defining the harmonic progressions that make up the first movement. Throughout the beginning 9-minute movement, the ensemble plays pattern music while the voices sing lines above it "" a very explicit accompaniment/solo relationship during which the choir describes men at work. A third of the way through, a solo violin begins outlining a series of chords through arpeggiation, which then gradually fill in and become a single shimmering chord. From this, the choir begins the second part of the poem, beginning with the line "The delicious singing of the mother" and ending in the far distance, listening to the "strong melodious songs." Each movement of Expecting ends with a series of wordless pulses, a sort of musical punctuation. If the first and third poems reference the political urgency of the city, the second movement is a pastoral interlude. Accordingly, the percussion parts in this movement are built around three expanding and contracting rhythms in the woodblock, tam-tam, and vibraphone. Three quarters of the choir sings a stylized Morse code (I was inspired by watching satellites pass overhead in the middle of the woods in Vermont; the now-omnipresent invisible haze of technology even in the fields), while some sopranos and altos overlay long, endless lines. The third movement is the most urgent and the most aggressive in its patterns: I wanted to reinforce Whitman's movement from the general to the very specific and accusatory second person of the end of the poem. A series of expanding and contracting rhythms and another wordless pulse brings the piece to a quiet close. '



It is refreshing to hear and read about this very young and gifted new composer and while we cannot expect every work he writes to be wholly successful, the ones chosen by Grant Gershon for this recording give a very sound introduction to those who may have never heard of Nico Muhly. The performances are up to the very high standard of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Perhaps this recording will place Nico Muhly well before the public - where it most assuredly belongs. Grady Harp, September 10"