Classical Playlist: ‘Poetry in Music’ and Gilles Vonsattel

Photo
Gilles Vonsattel, center, with the Danish String Quartet, with Frederik Oland, left, and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, right, in foreground.Credit Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York Times

‘POETRY IN MUSIC’
The Sixteen; Harry Christophers, conductor
(Coro)
In the liner notes for this rewarding album of 14 a cappella vocal works, Harry Christophers, the conductor of the vocal ensemble the Sixteen, wonders what composers would do without poets and dramatists. Usually, he writes, the better the text, the more inspired the composer. But actually, certain great poems resist musical settings. Music has to be able to add something. But the British composers represented here, covering five centuries, all chose distinguished texts and responded with extraordinary music. William Harris’s 1925 anthem for double chorus “Faire is the Heaven” (an Edmund Spenser poem), which opens the album, conveys the text through surging, intensely mystical music with effective back-and-forth exchanges. Tippett’s “Dance, clarion air” (words by Christopher Fry), unfolds with stabbing chords and jumpy repetitions, sounding almost giddy. The program is built around four austerely poignant settings by Tudor- and early-Stuart-era composers (Thomas Weelkes, Robert Ramsey, Michael East and Thomas Tomkins) of “When David Heard,” from the Biblical story of the slaying of Absalom. Britten’s remarkable “Hymn to Saint Cecilia” (words by Auden) is the longest piece here. There are also exceptional works by Edmund Rubbra, Herbert Howells and others. The performances are beautiful and brilliant. (Anthony Tommasini)

‘SHADOWLINES’
Gilles Vonsattel, piano
(Honens)
In this age of iTunes it’s easy to pick – and discard – individual tracks from a recording. But a great recital, like the one captured on this mesmerizing disc by the immensely talented pianist Gilles Vonsattel, is more than the sum of its parts. With intelligence and imagination he traces a path from the proud soliloquies of Scarlatti’s sonatas to the doubt-riddled monologues of Webern’s Variations and George Benjamin’s “Shadowlines,” a sequence of “canonic preludes” that take the piano’s ability to project split personalities to dramatic heights. Selections by Messiaen and Debussy round out the program and help place Mr. Benjamin, a British composer of scintillatingly Francophile sound worlds, in context. (Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim)

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Tracks from the recordings discussed this week. (Spotify users can also find it here.)