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Moving Music from the Baltic World New York
All Souls Church
03/02/2025 -
Veljo Tormis: Laulja – Raua Needmine
Arvo Pärt: The Beatitudes – Für Alina – The Deer’s Cry
Eriks Esenvalds: A Drop in the Ocean
Pēteris Vasks: The Fruit of Silence
Imant Raminsh: Blow, Wind
Nomeda Valanciūtė: Lietus Plonom Stiklinem Kojom
Onutė Narbutaitė: Vasara
Andris Dzenītis: Peace With Living Eyes
Trent Johnson (Organist), Spiff Weigand (Percussion)
Musica Viva NY Chamber Ensemble, Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez (Conductor/Pianist)
Musica Viva NY (© Musica Viva.com)
“A need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower. I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”
Arvo Pärt
When I first heard the Latvian Radio Choir several years ago, it became apparent that Latvia–and Estonia and Lithuania–probably had choral singers rivaled only by the choirs of Wales. Musica Viva is neither Baltic nor Welsh, but this New York group presented Baltic choir music yesterday afternoon. And it was a revealing picture of the region.
That should come as no surprise. Musica Viva, under their decade‑long leader Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, has radiated the most eclectic selections over the past few years. No mere Handel anthems for this group. In their last two incarnations, I heard them masterfully tackle David Lang, Caroline Shaw and Gustav Mahler, amongst other rarities.
Yesterday afternoon in their home base of All Souls Church, a dozen Baltic choral works–accompanied at times by piano, organ and percussion–singers standing in the aisles, on the church stage, and even floating down from the balcony.
In both senses, it was a moving experience..
Two of the names here were familiar. Arvo Pärt of course. And the scholarly Pēteris Vasks, both represented by several works. The other names were unknown to me, but each had their particular sounds, timbres and, above all, feelings.
Shortest was a haiku-styled The Rain on Thin Glass Legs by the Lithuanian Nomeda Valanciūtė. The verses were short, but her music presented a complex contrapuntal onomatopoeia to rain itself, repeated over and over again, the brevity itself a gift to the full house (full congregation?)
That followed the longest–and by far the most adventurous secular work–Veljo Tormis’ weirdly named A Curse upon Iron, which gave the whole program its name. A weird title, but based upon ancient Finnish epics–and an obvious analogy of the horrors of war. Mr. Tormis died several years ago, but the poem and the music were all too contemporary.
As the curses and execrations about iron (in Estonian-Finnish, rauda) piled up, I had the chuzpah to substitute, for the accursed name iron, a certain President. But this didn’t detract from the Estonian composer’s choral screams, the chants, the incessant bass drum (from percussionist Spiff Weigand), from the throbbing thrilling imprecations from women at their highest, men at the most menacing.
A. Hernandez-Valdez/V. Tormis (© Musica Viva/Valju Aloel)
Conductor Hernandez-Valdez was at his strongest here. He had played solo piano for Arvo Pärt’s lovely Fur Alina, but his mastery of this fierce unrelenting anti‑Iron work, was most memorable.
Mr. Tormis was represented by the unexpected opening. From the balcony, Musica Viva started his Singer with a vocal “Like a source of light” with a huge base drum tattoo. The soft notes of the start grew into a mighty crescendo, a startling music for a church.
Nobody could be surprised by Pärt’s religious works. Both The Deer’s Cry and Beatitudes showed his trademarks. The emptiness between phrases, the soothing minor seconds, the hypnotic phrasing were caught by Mr. Hernandez‑Valdez and communicated by the large and spot‑on balance of his ensemble.
I have always enjoy the illusion of simplicity in the music of Pēteris Vasks. Here, the prayer by Mama Theresa (known to her detractors as “The Charnel‑House Charlatan”) was simple in harmonies, though through the diatonic harmonies, the mark of his singular genius.
Two other works were memorable. Onutė Narbutaitė wrote the lyrics and music for her Summer. Another writer would have wrapped the words with lush sounds, tranquil voices. Ms. Narbutaitė did the opposite, alternating melodies with vocal thrumming, with drums and sighs.
The final work was most surprising and interesting of all. Latvian-Canadian Imant Raminsh took a Latvian seafaring song–a simple unsophisticated poem about a gambling ne’er‑do‑well marrying his sweetheart–turning it into a lavish, emotional complex piece. The angelic soprano Shabnam Abedi started with a balcony solo, antiphonally mating with the choir standing in the aisles of the church. With a result with far deeper feeling than the original words.
Yet these unexpected harmonies, these full-bodied voices, these unpredictable transitions, were all part of (what I presume to be) the Baltic experience.
A 32-voice American choir, with the sometimes awful resonance of a large church, would usually have its defects. Yet conductor Hernandez‑Valdez has been with them long enough–with the church as the usual residence–that he produced a full, reverberant sound.
Add to this the rarest of gifts, program notes both biographic and musically filling by Evangeline Athanasiou. And augment this with the truly unforeseen. Three‑thousand miles away, synchronously the same, an Academy Award for the Latvian environmental film, The Flow.
Was it coincidence? Or divinely inspired. I would say the former. But that hardly detracted from secular and religious music breathing the aura of the divine.
Harry Rolnick
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