Description
Lenora Meister, executive producer
Any new release from Yarlung Records is noteworthy, more so when the release is a complete program of music by one of the world’s most highly regarded choral composers. Tarik O’Regan relocated from Great Britain to the San Francisco area where he’s now composer-in-residence for Pacific Chorale. O’Regan’s style is immediately engaging, largely tonal with minimalistic elements and occasional aleatoric techniques. All Things Common programs seven works written between 2001 and 2019, the most recent, Facing West, a Pacific Chorale commission. Running 20 minutes, the album’s centerpiece is The Ecstasies Above, which has the two-dozen singers joined by a small string ensemble. O’Regan evocatively sets Edgar Allen Poe’s poem Israfel, Israfel being the Angel of Music destined to proclaim the Resurrection with “the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.”
–Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound
Track listing:
All Things Common
Blessed Are They
Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis
Turn
Facing West
The Ecstasies Above
I Listen to the Stillness of You
Working with conductor and Pacific Chorale music director Robert Istad is always a pleasure. When he asked Yarlung to record his debut album with Pacific Chorale performing music by Tarik O’Regan, I knew we were in for a treat. I loved the acoustics at The Soraya, where we recorded Nostos with Rob, but for Pacific Chorale, we were able to work in magnificent Samueli Theater at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts, where Pacific Chorale is a resident company. I always enjoy making recordings in Samueli Theater, with fabulous and adjustable acoustics, silent air conditioning and lights, and a theater staff that treats our Yarlung crew like returning royalty.
The wonderful Lenora Meister, long a singer with Pacific Chorale herself, not only commissioned Facing West, recorded for the first time on this album, but she underwrote and served as executive director for our project.
String players from Salastina joined Pacific Chorale for some of the repertoire on our album. Salastina musicians included co-directors Maia Jasper White and Kevin Kumar on violins; Meredith Crawford, viola; Charles Tyler, cello; and Eric Shetzen, bass. Beyond their roles with Salastina, many listeners will know Meredith Crawford as principal viola in the Pacific Symphony at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, and Maia Jasper White as a member of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and as Martin Chalifour’s violin partner playing Schoenberg in Yarlung’s Martin Chalifour in Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Writing about Rob and Pacific Chorale, Tarik commented in our liner notes “Working with Robert Istad and Pacific Chorale… has been an especially important experience for me…. The composition comes to life measure by measure, brick by brick, until eventually it stands free, breathing and swaying ever so slightly from the breezes of subtle interpretations and gentle inflexions. This is the magic in the air….”
Dimitar Kovachev –
Transparent, crystal and pure piece of work. The choir’s mastery is unsurpassed in its clarity and vocal technique. Beautiful music.
Grego Applegate Edwards –
The choral music of Tarik O’Regan has something timeless about it, obliquely reaching back into sacred Western traditions as reference points yet making a joyfully contemporary noise of it all, not sounding like an Arvo Part so much as sharing an old-in-new synthetic view in its own way original and lyrical, Occident to quasi-Orient? West to East?
From the opening strains of the title work “All Things Common” (2017) we hear a rooted euphonious outreaching both highly lyrical and ultimately at key moments redolent with a spinning circularity and modality that marks it all as of our current time without sacrificing the linearity of sacred vocal tradition from the Gregorian period onward.
Seven works in all grace the program (Yarlung Records YAR02592), the centerpiece being the world premier recording of the specially commissioned “Facing West.” All show how the Pacific Chorale and (as needed) the string quintet Salastina under conductor Robert Istad seem temperamentally suited in a near ideal way to the subtle lyric expression of the music.
The old-in-new aspect of O’Regan is especially prominent in the mass-chant evolution of “Magnificat & Nunc Dimitis: Variations for Choir” of 2001. From there the compositions move directionally away from such things to a tonal-rituality that is originally contentful “The Ecstacies Above” (2006) has dramatic push and pull and works itself out intricately between choral and string voices. The musical syntax follows a motival sequence with variations around and upon it.
“I Listen to the Stillness of You” (2016) is a portion of “Mass Observation. ” It sends us off with a beautifully melodic caress of lyrical sound.
The sum total of this inclusive O’Regan program is a significant mix of choral gems spanning the millennium to now. Each work stands out on its own and ultimately Istad and the Pacific Chorale paint a beautifully full picture of the composer and his lucid beauty of idea and form. I’ve listened countless times and each hearing opens out new vistas, so I have no doubt on this one. Enthusiastically recommended.
Grego Applegate Edwards
Emilio D. Miler –
Tarik’s choral writing really makes the most out of the fact that he’s writing for a group of living, breathing instruments. The phrasing and articulation (I’m *very* intrigued to see how much of what I heard in that regard is written out, and if so, how!) makes the ensemble breath like a single organism at times, while in other passages (the opening track surprised me that way) the accented, overemphasized, or just offset attacks (more specifically, consonants) gave the feel of a spoken layer hidden in between the melodic lines.
Even though I usually enjoy having the booklet handy for an “old school” listening experience, in which I read liner notes and other info as I listen, in this case I stopped reading early on, as I felt so entranced by the music that I didn’t want anything to distract me from it. In sum, congrats once again for a magnificent job and, once again, you have functioned like a curator of sorts, pointing my attention to fellow creators that are doing groundbreaking work.
–Emilio
Shirley Cason –
The vocals sound wonderful and the arrangements are out of this world! ALL THINGS COMMON is a much needed album for people to drift & escape into a beautiful musical journey with musicianship that is so expressive! I know it took a lot of work, thinking & creating and music arrangements to record each song just right. Which you and everyone did! The album was also recorded & mixed very well!Thank you for creating an album that inspires people to take a musical journey through voices. The songs I enjoyed the most are ALLTHINGS COMMON and FACING WEST. I like how it starts out with the cello!
Growing up in the choir at church & in school…. it’s a very human soulful sound that is full of hope & love.
Madi Brinkmann –
Your work is always exquisite.
Dennis Scott, Dennis Scott Productions & Act IV Music –
A beautiful blending of the human voice with others like it. Both the writing and the performance are exquisite.
Enayet Hossain –
WOW! Wonderfully recorded and such a beautiful peaceful album. It’s 4 am and I am glad to be listening to it. It is so peacefully gratifying. BTW, my absolute favorite track is “Blessed Are They.” I am going to listen to this, whenever I need some calmness in my life.
Kimberly –
Oh my goodness, this sounds amazing! I’ve been in several different choirs and I don’t ever recall sounding as remarkable as this!
Ahhhh!
How lovely to hear!
Rush Paul –
This is without a doubt among the two or three most beautifully recorded choral albums in my music library. And, the fact that it was recorded with a single stereo microphone in Pure DSD256 (with two ambiance microphones for the surround sound edition) makes it perhaps the most transparent, utterly lucid choral recording I know—among the best of the best.
True to Yarlung’s recording aesthetic, the 24 singers from Pacific Chorale and five string players from Salastina Music Society recorded this album in single takes of entire tracks recorded in the smaller, more intimate, 300-seat Samueli Theater at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The performance you hear is real. It is not surgically stitched together from many different takes.
The works on this album are composed by English composer and Pacific Chorale’s Composer-in-Residence Tarik O’Regan. They feature choral writing for a variety of vocal and instrumental combinations composed over several decades, and shows the arc of his musical style and compositional career—from the earliest piece performed, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis of 2001, to Facing West (a setting of Walt Whitman’s poem for eight-part chorus and solo cello) completed in 2019 on commission by Pacific Chorale as O’Regan became a resident of California.
These are 21st Century works, but with all the lyricism and tonality of the great earlier choral tradition with which O’Regan grew up. His compositions begin at Oxford University, where he wrote for the famous all-male Choir of New College, Oxford, with its boy trebles, and continued during his time as a postgraduate composition student at Cambridge University, where he wrote for the renowned SATB mixed choir at Clare College.
The longest work of the album is the almost 20-minute The Ecstasies Above (2006), which O’Regan composed for two vocal quartets, chorus, and string quartet. It was a Yale Institute of Sacred Music (Yale University) commission, and was premiered by the Yale Schola Cantorum. Frequently performed, The Ecstasies Above sets the poem Israfel by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). The contrasting sections and sound combinations between the three main musical groups are fascinating to hear. I was thoroughly engaged by the piece in this, my first, hearing of the work. I cannot imagine it being performed better than heard here, nor can I imagine a more utterly lucid and transparent recording with such incredibly precise location of performers.
The album closes with the intimate I Listen to the Stillness of You (2016) setting the text of the D. H. Lawrence poem Amores (1916). The stillness and beauty of this track makes for a transcendent close to this outstanding album.
Bob Attiyeh –
Thank you so much Rush, for allowing us to post (with Editor David W. Robinson’s gracious permission) your article in Positive Feedback. Here is the url to the much longer article titled delightfully “My Top Of The Pile”
https://positive-feedback.com/reviews/music-reviews/pure-dsd256-top-of-the-pile/
Here is the more focused article Rush published:
https://positive-feedback.com/reviews/music-reviews/recent-finds-no-42-rachel-podgers-new-album-plus-pure-dsd256-from-yarlung/#:~:text=All%20Things%20Common%E2%80%94Music%20of%20Tarik%20O%27Regan
Thank you Rush and thank you David!