Because Traditional songs and spirituals, plus works by Burleigh, Florence Price, Strong and Trotignon Reginald Mobley (countertenor), Baptiste Trotignon (piano) Alpha Classics ALPHA 936 55:26 mins
Countertenor Reginald Mobley has forged a stellar career across Baroque and Classical repertoire, and this outstanding album finds him on glittering form as an exponent of the Spiritual.
In 1925, the Johnson Brothers compiled and edited the first volume of their two books of Spirituals, which they deemed to be ‘unsurpassed among the folk songs of the world and, in the poignancy of their beauty, unequalled’. The selection is shaped around these remarkable songs, most of them in deft and bittersweet jazz arrangements by the album’s pianist Baptiste Trotignon. Among many highlights, ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ fizzes with urgency and quickly establishes Mobley’s extraordinary vocal flair, while his beautifully soft rendition of ‘Steal Away’ perhaps tugs most powerfully at the heartstrings, heightened by Patrick Dupre Quigley’s introspective arrangement based from start to finish around a pulsing pedal note.
There are also a number of older arrangements and works, including Harry Thacker Burleigh’s delicate ‘Jean’ and Florence Price’s wrenchingly powerful ‘Resignation’, which sets the composer’s own poetry. A special addition is a bravura account of Whitfield and Strong’s ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’, made famous by Marvin Gaye in his 1967 recording and given a soaring new treatment here.
For all its beauty, the album also feels like a call to action. The horrors of racial violence cannot be separated from this repertoire, and a sense of urgent injustice is brought home by these performances of dignity and power.
Kate Wakeling
