Poulenc, Mass in G major, etc., Elora Festival Singers/Noel Edison (Naxos)It might sometimes be easy to think of C20th music as spiky, dissonant and often difficult. That would be to discount late Romantics like Rachmanninov, Sibelius and Elgar and any number of other composers who continued in the old tradition. Those bad boys who kicked up the most fuss demanded all the attention but Modernism is over 100 years old now and more and more it looks more like a vogue and a period in history than the way things must be done from now on. Poulenc and Szymanowski are two that come to mind who were surely doing more than continue in pre-Modernist ways but they both wrote music of sublime lushness at times.
The Mass, as well as the motets, on this new disc from the ever praiseworthy Naxos label, are more wandering, contemplative and bleak than the Stabat Mater. You might expect that of motets for the season of Lent. They are never quite allowed to relax and resolve themselves, forever moving to a dissonance of mild discomfort. I'm not sure how this Mass should be approached in balancing the opportunities to sing with some gusto and the chance to relish its delicate high lines. It shifts about more than one might want to make a coherent unity out of it. But perhaps that's the broken nature of 'modern' sensibility. However, credit where it is due, the Agnus Dei is the highlight, echoing the medieval from the spare vantage point of 1937.
The Motets for the Season of Christmas are thus more quietly devotional and less anxious. All of the pieces here would benefit from a church acoustic rather than a Sony CMT-S20B, I'm sure, but I don't have room to assemble the Elora Festival Singers here.
They make a fine sound in these not over-long compositions. They are not meant to be exciting, and aren't. It is meditative and serious, the Christmas set ending the disc with its most joyous mood, Gloria in excelsis deo, Alleluia, the least restrained but still only moving towards exuberance and, really, quite brief.
If one doesn't try these things, one never finds out. This disc is not always going to be the one to choose when Poulenc feels like the thing I want to listen to and that's betting without the Dialogues des Carmelites discs I haven't bought yet.
I've just accidentally put 10 times more than I intended on my four horses at Sandown tomorrow. If they all win, I can sit and click on CD's on Amazon for a whole evening, get my Ton Koopman Buxtehude Complete Works, a Bach Cantatas box-set, the Haydn String Quartets and everything else one really ought to have that I as yet don't. So the Poulenc opera will be on that list.
Later. Playing the disc a second time, I like it more. It has its way of capturing that weird mystery so beloved of religion, and perhaps Catholicism in particular. That will teach me not to review things first time out and well before the end of the first bottle of Roc de Chevaliers, Bordeaux Superieur 2012.