Marshall: Out of the Darkness, etc. – Melanie Pappenheim, Sophie Harris, Lucy Railton, Howard Moody
Out of the Darkness is a new secular cantata for mezzo-soprano, two cellos, and eight voices, written by Julian Marshall. The inspiration for the piece is the poem ‘Aus dem Dunkel’ (Out of the Darkness) by Gertrud Kolmar. Kolmar lived in Berlin for much of her life, but was transported to Auschwitz in 1943, where she perished. Her poetry is strikingly full of life – colour, vibrancy, deep sensation – and ‘Aus dem Dunkel’ is one of her most beautiful. Written in 1937, it evokes powerful dream-like images of crumbling and decay, serving as an eerie foretelling of the tidal wave of horror about to hit the world.
Also featured on this recording is another world premiere, a new piece by Gavin Bryars for mezzo-soprano, cello, and keyboard. The Island Chapel was commissioned by the Tate Gallery St Ives in 1997, for performance in St Nicholas Chapel, St Ives, and involves a response to a number of different elements, from the chapel itself to the relationship between the chapel and the Tate Gallery across the bay. The music was designed for performance before a small invited audience in this intimate, semi-private space – the chapel is tiny and the maximum audience size was six people in addition to the three performers. The text comprises two self-contained poems, ‘Crossing No. 3’ and ‘Crossing No. 4’, from an extended poem The Manifestations of the Voyage by the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan.
Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) was written in 1978 and was the last piece Arvo Pärt wrote before escaping Soviet rule to live in Europe. The listener is invited utterly to clear his or her mind of all extraneous and unnecessary noise and to focus completely on pure sonority, without concerns for emotional trajectory or pictorial representation. Every note is perfectly placed, nothing is unnecessary, and the method of adding one note at a time to the cello’s alternately rising and falling line is plain to hear. This is some of the purest musical expression ever created and is entirely typical of the style which has earned Arvo Pärt such popularity with audiences all over the world.
