Eriks Ešenvalds: Translations

Portland State Chamber Choir, Ethan Sperry, cond.

Naxos 8.574124 (CD, auditioned as 24/96 WAV). 2020. Erick Lichte, prod.; John Atkinson, Doug Tourtelot, engs.

Performance *****

Sonics ****½

I’ll admit to a conflict of interest in choosing as Recording of the Month a work co-engineered by our very own John Atkinson. We—I, who nominated the piece, and Editor Jim Austin, who ultimately chose the winner—have both worked with John for years. And I’d never deny it was moving to sit next to him during his recent visit to Port Townsend following the release party for this new album, Translations, watching him shed tears as we listened together to the heavenly voices of the Portland State Chamber Choir singing “In paradisum” (2012), which Latvian composer Eriks Ešenvalds dedicated to his grandmother, who died the morning of the premiere.

But to dismiss this Recording of the Month selection as an inside job is to overlook some essential facts: The music is gorgeous, filled with an ethereal beauty that speaks to me of celestial realms. The singing is equal in quality to the finest I’ve heard on record. And the recording quality is exemplary: If Translations were available in even higher resolutions than 24/96, I would have rated it 5 stars for sonics instead of 4.5, something I very rarely do.

The album’s seven compositions address “translation,” which PSCC choir director Ethan Sperry describes as “the transformations that occur within us when we encounter the power of nature, legends, or the divine.” Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Peterson, whose poetry Ešenvalds set to music on two of these tracks, explains further: “Art translates mystery for us without destroying that mystery.”

The opening track, “O salutaris hostia,” sets text by St. Thomas Aquinas. The choir, placed far behind the pristine voices of sopranos Kate Ledington and Maeve Stier, creates a soft cushion of air underneath the women’s voices as they float heavenward, a prayer of peace. As the tracks unfold, we discover Ešenvalds’s unique use of dissonance and frequent changes of key or mode to express consonance, stillness, and harmony. In “Translation,” Ešenvalds places a soloist in the foreground, supported by a background choir and the otherworldly shimmering sounds of handbells bowed by wooden rods.

“This is an album for those who don’t necessarily like choral music,” producer Erick Lichte, himself a choral conductor, explained to me by telephone. “It has so many entry points, and far more colors and acoustic dimensionality than the average choral album. Few if any composers present or past have really utilized all the compositional techniques of the past 1000 years, each in its own measure, to express specific emotional states. It’s equally rare that a composer can write gorgeous and approachable melodies, marry them with dissonance, and create so many unique textures in one composition.”

The title track was set down in three parts: solo quartet, choir, and then, late at night, when traffic noise had ceased, those singing handbells. The sustained tones from the tuned bells start up slowly, so they were recorded separately to ensure synchrony. On another track, “My Thoughts,” the stratospheric high-F soprano conclusion was recorded separately and layered in. Because John Atkinson was not available for the first recording sessions, Tacoma’s Doug Tourtelot did the engineering honors. John, who considers Translations the finest of his 40 commercially released recordings, was also responsible for the mastering, downsampling, noise shaping, and dithering of the CD version. The array of six microphones was the same that John used to such great effect on Doors of Heaven, the choir’s earlier, Billboard-chart–topping recording of other works by Ešenvalds.

The dynamic range is wide. Roon rates it at 20dB, equal to both the Kleiber and Currentzis recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and to me it seems wider. On my big rig, John frequently turned the volume down on quiet passages in anticipation of the louder passages to follow. Ear-gear–loving Herb Reichert finds the quietest passages so soft that he recommends closed-backed headphones to hear them clearly.

Save for the remarkable, ear-opening “Legend of the Walled-in Woman” (2005), a shifting, 11-minute-45-second tour-de-force that combines an old Albanian folk song with another from the 20th century, just about everything on Translations is slow. It wasn’t meant to be that way: Plans to include a new commission were scrapped because Ešenvalds couldn’t finish it in time. No matter: It works well as it is, although, given the recording’s surfeit of similarly paced sweetness, its aesthetically elevated marriage of musical and engineering mastery is best savored a little at a time, like fine wine or, in places where it’s legal, potent cannabis.—Jason Victor Serinus

John Atkinson auditions the Translations CD in Jason’s listening room.

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