In my decade-plus of choral music practice, I have never been more touched by a musical depiction of the story of Christ than in Ēriks Ešenvalds’s Passion and Resurrection, brought to life in a recording of the same title through the supreme efforts of the choir Polyphony, the Britten Sinfonia, soprano soloist Carolyn Sampson, and conductor Stephen Layton.
Ešenvalds, who stands shoulder to shoulder among contemporary choral giants like Estonia’s Arvo Pärt, Scotland’s James MacMillan, and America’s Eric Whitacre, likewise revels in the effervescent shimmer of tight harmonies communicated primarily through voices. Though Ešenvalds is known for pieces such as Stars and Only in Sleep (each garnering hundreds of thousands of listens on streaming platforms) which share some aesthetic similarity to works by Whitacre, there is more than meets the eye to this Latvian composer.
Much of Ešenvalds’s output can be characterized by his attachment to the choral medium, a penchant for juxtaposing old source material within a newer, refreshed context, and a fervent connection to Christianity, which are expertly put on display in this album.
Evening, and all the birds
In a chorus of shimmering sound
Are easing their hearts of joy
For miles around.
The air is blue and sweet,
The few first stars are white,—
Oh let me like the birds
Sing before night.Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), "Dusk in June"
The centerpiece of the album is Ešenvalds’s Passion and Resurrection, a four-movement oratorio recounting the death and resurrection of Jesus. But there's much else to love on this album, from the beautifully sung Long Road (another frequent listener favorite), to the poignant A Drop in the Ocean, a work that commemorates the life of Mother Theresa and cites her and St. Francis of Assisi as its source text.
More secular in its content, Ešenvalds’s setting of the Sara Teasdale poem “Dusk in June” gently murmurs and glistens, and invites the ear to wander in a lush evening mood. Though concise, Evening somehow seems to vibrate through the soul in a perfect marriage of music and text, with crystalline harmonies evoking the feeling of hearing birdsong at evening:
Legend of the Walled-in Woman, meanwhile, is a striking and sophisticated setting of an Albanian folktale. As the story goes, a mother of three sons who were building a castle dreamt that in order to prevent the castle from being destroyed by invaders every night, one of them would have to sacrifice their wife. Two of the brothers warned their wives, while one did not; the next day, she came to bring food and was enclosed within the foundation of the castle.
Ešenvalds’s setting of this eerie folktale masterfully displays both the utterly terrifying nature of its subject matter and the folklore origin through his juxtaposition of tonalities, language (contrasting the original Albanian folksong with a translated English epitaph for the titular walled-in woman), and musical styles as a means of storytelling.
This technique is also used to great effect throughout his Passion and Resurrection, the work I consider to be the crown jewel of the album (though I may be biased, having performed the work as a chorister in the past). Another multilingual work, this time sung in English and Latin, the text of the Passion and Resurrection is derived from multiple liturgical sources, including the Old Testament and Byzantine liturgy, and recounts Christ’s crucifixion, death, rebirth, and Mary Magdalene beholding the risen Christ, though not necessarily in that order. A renaissance-era motet by Cristóbal de Morales (1500-1553) is quoted directly throughout as a sort of temporal anchor to the past, and is performed as a separate SATB quartet, in combination with an additional soprano soloist — Carolyn Sampson here — plus a full choir and string orchestra.
The work is episodic in structure, but not linear, told through fragmented, interweaving layers which are expressed through stark musical juxtaposition. Take this excerpt from the first movement, for example:
Unsettling and tonally distant string jabs punctuate the purity of the motet, collapsing elements of past and future into one musical ecosystem. The strings later serve as the connective musical tissue to the soprano soloist, who sings a separate but thematically similar text sourced from Byzantine liturgy.
In movement two, Ešenvalds takes us to the crucifixion itself, told with stormy vitriol:
Violent and chaotic string activity underpins wildly modulating chords in the choir, ultimately climaxing on an excruciatingly dissonant chord existing outside of any key sung repeatedly on the text “Crucify!” There is no purity or musical respite to be had until the soloist and quartet return later in the movement, once again overlapping and distorting past, present, and future, both musically and narratively:
In the last movement, Ešenvalds recounts Christ’s resurrection, told through an ecstatic choral proclamation:
But this ecstasy is short-lived, and what follows is one of the most stunning and achingly beautiful choral-orchestral conclusions to a piece of music I have ever heard. The soloist, as Mary Magdalene, asks Jesus (who she mistakes for a gardener) where his body has been laid:
Serene strings and oscillating warm and rich chords sung by the choir on “Mariam” seem to lead the listener into heaven itself, while Mary Magdalene placidly chants “Rabonni” (or “Teacher” in Aramaic, referring to Jesus).
When I sang this piece myself some years ago, it took tremendous effort not to break down sobbing at this point in the performance. As a listener, I am fortunate to have that bittersweet pleasure, and I encourage you to let the music wash over you and bring you, as well, to tears.
