Jeff Beal
The Salvage Men; plus works by Barber, Daniel Nelson and Eric Whitacre
Eric Ericson Chamber Choir/Fredrik Malmberg
BIS BIS-2599 57:45 mins
Clip: Jeff Beal: The Salvage Men – Age (Eric Ericson Chamber Choir)
The Eric Ericson Chamber Choir are justly acclaimed as one of the world’s top choirs and this outstanding new release highlights their many strengths. Featuring four warmly accessible modern works, this is an album of terrific vitality which showcases the choir’s gorgeous breadth of timbre and precise sense of ensemble.
Jeff Beal’s The Salvage Men (2014) explores themes of pain and transformation, and was composed after Beal found himself living with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Beal is best known for his film and TV scores, but this richly contemplative choral work finds him equally comfortable in the concert hall. The work opens with an affecting setting of a passage from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, followed by settings of taut, beautiful poems by American poet Kay Ryan. As Ryan notes, ‘It isn’t ever delicate to live’, and Beal’s restless harmonic language offers a nuanced sense of redemption that similarly resists the sentimental.
Other highlights include a wonderfully alert account of Samuel Barber’s Reincarnations (1939-40), which sets texts by the Irish poet James Stephens. Here the choir display a remarkable sense of ensemble, notably in the bell-like clarity of attack heard in the exuberant song of celebration, ‘Mary Hynes’. The choir is on equally fine form for Daniel Nelson’s The New Colossus, a setting of Emma Lazarus’s text inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty which Nelson explores with commendable nuance, incorporating both blazing sonic force and a sense of tiptoeing hesitancy. Glorious accounts of two appealing Eric Whitacre works complete the selection. Kate Wakeling