Canty - Carmina Celtica - MusicWeb International
"There are a number of thematic strands running through this programme:
the wanderings of Celtic saints across Europe in the Dark Ages, light
and the heavenly bodies, and the life-force of creation, to name but
three. The most important aspect of this recording for Canty, however,
is that for the first time we have been able to celebrate part of the
rapidly growing corpus of contemporary music that has been of vital
importance to us since we began our musical journey. Everything on this
disc, old and new, is a world-premiere recording, reflecting our
conviction that the musical interfaces between classical/traditional,
ancient/modern, and east/west are permeable ground, rich and ripe for
exploration" - so writes Rebecca Taverner, director of Canty, in her
helpful booklet note.
When Rebecca Taverner speaks of the interfaces between
ancient/modern, etc., being "permeable ground", she points both to the
strengths and - no doubt unconsciously - to an area of weakness in this
generally very rewarding disc. The first thing that should be stressed
is that all concerned perform beautifully and that the recorded sound is
superb. But, at times, it is the ‘sound' that one finds oneself
listening to, rather than the music, rather than the musical
interpretation of the text, by composer and performers. While I
certainly wouldn't want to go so far as to say that the music here is
homogenised, I do think, after a number of listenings, that there isn't
quite enough stylistic differentiation between musical idioms - which
are different even if related - and that there is a tendency to value
beauty of sound over subtle negotiation with text. These are, after all,
settings of texts which are often profoundly poetic, richly resonant
with traditional imagery.
Having offered a few words of qualification, it is time to praise
much of what is to be heard here. The programme opens beautifully with
two prayers to St. Columba from the Inchcolm Antiphoner - one of the
earliest surviving Scottish music manuscripts, from the first half of
the fourteenth century, fragments of which are now in Edinburgh
university Library - framing James MacMillan's setting of ‘Os mutorum',
an antiphon for St. Columba taken from the same manuscript. Indeed the
whole programme is well-designed in terms of connections, parallels and
contrasts. Poetically speaking, a recurrent thread is of light in
darkness, from the opening item's praise of St. Columba as "resplendent
patron / and radiance of righteousness" through Joanne Metcalf's lovely
‘Shining Light', Rebecca Rowe's ‘There is nothing brighter than the sun'
- an intriguing setting of words by Al Ghazali - the celebration of St.
Columba as "a new sun / To illuminate the world with its rays / And
give growth and life to the lands through its warmth" in the plainchant
‘A solis occasu', culminating in the cosmic imagery of the medieval text
in praise of St. Kentigern, set in an English translation by James
McCarthy (‘The stars in their Courses'), a saint "whose fame the
squadrons / of heaven, the stars in their courses, / [...] proclaim to the
Lord". Naturally there are counterbalancing images of darkness and
difficulty, too - St. Gall lost amongst thickets of thorn, St. Kentigern
enduring four days in "aquis frigidis".
Of the modern pieces, Rebecca Rowe's three-voice ‘There is nothing
brighter than the sun' is a thing of radiant beauty and Tavener's ‘Two
Hadiths' is striking for its use of the bray harp, which contribute its
own distinctive textures to the composer's contemplative writing. Peter
McGarr's setting of a text from the Carmina Gadelica makes striking use of the kind of heterophony which characterises traditional Gaelic psalm-singing.
The singers of Canty create a beautifully blended sound and William
Taylor's performances leave nothing to be desired. While retaining the
slight reservations made earlier in this review, I should stress that
this is a CD I have enjoyed a good deal; still, given the nature of
those reservations this is a CD best ‘dipped into' rather than listened
to all the way through.