MSR Classics Presents Voces Musicales

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

Voces Musicales is an Estonian chamber choir, whose album A Black Birch in Winter was released by MSR Classics last spring. The group is led by American conductor David Puderbaugh, who first encountered them in the fall of 2004, when he was doing doctoral research on Estonian national song festivals. While pursuing his research, he joined the ensemble as a singer and subsequently assumed duties as a conductor.

This cross-cultural relationship is reflected in A Black Birch in Winter. Compositions by American composers Kile Smith and Gregory W. Brown are interleaved with the works of three Estonian composers, Evelin Seppar, Pärt Uusberg, and Maria Kõrvits. By all rights this should make for fascinating listening, but personal experience has not leaned me in that direction.

Those that have followed my work for some time known that I have encountered satisfying performances of several different choral ensembles in San Francisco, many of which have agendas based on encouraging the creation of new works. Among those institutions, Volti is the one that has promoted its repertoire most successfully by releasing recordings to supplement its performances. I do not attend as many Volti concerts as I would prefer. However, through the events I have experienced, I have learned that even the best of recording techniques never rises to the level of intimacy one experiences from a performance. Thus, I find that I consistently enjoy making the acquaintance of new compositions through Volti concerts; and that acquaintance is then reinforced when a recording of that music is released.

All this amounts to an attempt at diagnosing why A Black Birch in Winter left me cold (with no puns about the weather intended). When the texts are in English, the performances tend to sound too much like syllables hanging on notes. When the texts are not in English, the booklet provides only the English translations, making it virtually impossible to associate the semantics of the text with the rhetoric of the music. Taken as a whole, the album almost seems to undermine any of the motivations behind the efforts of both the composers and the performers.