Reviews

CD Review: French Choral Music III

25.02.2008

Maurice Ohana’s mother tongue [Spanish, ed.] has clearly been of enormous inspiration to Edith Canat de Chizy: for her Canciones (1992) the words of St. John of the Cross provided her with an apparently limitless interplay of colours and rhythms.
In To gather paradise it is the languorous poetry of Emily Dickinson which has found an appropriate vocal derivative. But above all it is Dios, a new foray by the composer into the work of Federico Garcia Lorca, which attracts attention, with its varied sliding and descending figures, and its overall exceptionally active and instrumental treatment of the text. This is not far removed from Ohana’s madrigal-like style, which is illustrated now and then in the eclectic Swan Song (L’epitaphe) and Le Tombeau de Louize Labé.
The Nederlands Kamerkoor negotiates these scores with virtuosic elegance and a shimmering high range. In the low range the sound is less substantial, but one could be grateful to the choir for abandoning the full-bodied and narcissistic sound it has sometimes favoured.
It is a coherent and enthralling programme in honour of two ‘sculptors of sound’, as François Porcile puts it in his programme note – someone who can speak about the music of Maurice Ohana and Edith Canat de Chizy as no other.

Benoit Fauchet