Choral Music of Morton Feldman & Stefan Wolpe

Wolpe's 1937 work Two Chinese Epitaphs is from his period of politically-committed socialist art. These two pieces, for chorus and drums, set protest poems decrying the atrocities committed against the powerless (the inlay writer makes the all-too-predictable comparison to Picasso's Guernica). The first piece is full of driving rhythms, dissonant and vigorous; the second is more consonant and subdued.

The two short pieces by Morton Feldman make a dramatic contrast to the vigour and anger of the Wolpe. Christian Wolff in Cambridge, for a capella chorus and written in 1963, is nothing more than a three-minute sequence of chords. Chorus and Instruments II was written four years later, and adds tuba and chimes. It floats along in much the same way, though less consonantly.

Returning to Wolpe, we hear his Four Pieces for Mixed Chorus. The tonal harmony of these pieces was related to the occasion for which it was written--a competition to write a work for an amateur Israeli choir--but the complexity of the writing meant it did not win the competition. This work strikes me as rather dry; despite some of its passing beauties I don't find it to represent Wolpe at his best.

Feldman's For Stefan Wolpe was written in 1986, a year before the younger composer's death. At half an hour in duration, this work, for chorus and vibraphones, is one of the shorter of Feldman's late works. As with almost all late Feldman, the music is slow and quiet, and based on a number of short, gradually varying motifs that are repeated several times before moving onto the next. The work largely takes the form of a call-and-response structure between the chorus and vibraphones; though at the beginning of the work the choral parts are dominant, in the later stages of the work the vibraphone parts become gradually more extended.

This is a good disc with an enjoyable variety of music--most of which is hard to come by on compact disc--on it. The Choir of Saint Ignatius of Antioch acquit themselves well under Harold Chaney, though I feel that Wolpe's Four Pieces needs the dynamism and technical assurance that a more big-name choir might bring. Nonetheless, this disc is well worth investigating if you're a fan of either composer.