Conspirare, Craig Hella Johnson
www.thresholdofnight.com
Tarik O’Regan is a 30-year-old British composer now living in New York. This music for chorus and strings is of unearthly beauty. The music is strongly tonal — even hauntingly tuneful in the Triptych — and, as with much of Ralph Vaughan Williams or Gavin Bryars (to take entirely different generations of British composers) the volume levels seldom seem to exceed the briefest forte. As with the music of John Adams, you know listening to O’Regan that the minimalism of Glass, Reich, Nyman and Riley once happened, but that this composer has no interest in any music that smacks, even remotely, of mannerism or theory. He wrote much of this at the Yaddo writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, so it should surprise no one that he takes his texts from Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allan Poe (Israfel), Kathleen Raine, John Fletcher, Blake, Wordsworth, Hardy and Milton.
Jeff Simon, Buffalo News
Mesmerizing and sublime, O’Regan’s music layers voices with brilliant intricacy and he deftly combines airy melodies and subtle dissonances to a powerful effect. Three of the 11 pieces on Threshold were commissioned by Conspirare director Craig Hella Johnson — two set to poems by Emily Dickinson and one to a poem by Pablo Neruda. Conspirare performed the program here last September before heading to the famed Troy Music Hall to record. The title work, Threshold of Night, is set to a poem by Kathleen Raine and earned O’Regan his second British Composer Award.J. C. van Ryzin, Austin American-Statesman
The seven works on offer here, all recorded for the first time, are…significant and eminently worthy entries into the modern choral repertoire. It’s not easy to describe the music, which is fundamentally tonal but not based on traditional ideas of melodic themes and harmonic movement, but there are some recurring structural and thematic features, including the use of imitative, often overlapping layers of melodic/rhythmic fragments. The works here were all written within the past three years, but they are all quite distinctive and different, owing to O’Regan’s concern for and ability to “get inside” the poetry and because, well, he’s a truly gifted, skilled, creative artist who seems to be concerned with writing original music–no hooks, gimmicks, or formulas–that although variously challenging, people can hear and feel and perform and understand, music that’s worthy and demanding of repetition, which will engender a desire for more.
David Vernier, ClassicsToday
This is seven-course O’Regan – and what a feast it is. The gradual opening-out of Had I Not Seen the Sun is beautifully managed, as are the solo parts by soprano Melissa Givens and tenor Jonathon Subia. This is Dickinson’s ‘wilderness’ indeed, through preparing a space for the inrush of music to follow. The great expanses of calm over which a solo violin or soprano soars; the ecstatic dances; the surging rhythms: these are likewise animated by a fine sense of balance between precision and abandon in The Ecstasies Above and point to he combination of restless urgency and refulgent string passages in Triptych while providing a perfect counterpoint to the glowing transparency of Threshold of Night. The use of pedals or drones over which vocal arabesques play with sinuous clarity; the shimmering polyphonic textures in which the homophonic passages are reflected like Moorish architecture in a fountain; the supple and often surprising use of rhythm to underscore a poetic idea: all these are constant sources of delight and to be found in abundance on this exceptionally well-recorded and presented release.Robert Levett, International Record Review
The 30-year-old British composer Tarik O’Regan has made a stealth entrance into the U.S. classical-music consciousness. His music is virtuosic, impulsively careening toward maximum drama in his treatment of texts by Edgar Allan Poe and Pablo Neruda, often with simultaneous ideas in opposing keys, but so skillfully written for the choral medium that singers don’t come close to losing their bearings.David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer
At the start of the 2007 season, Conspirare captivated audiences in Austin and Houston with a concert of works by the phenomenally gifted (and award-winning) young composer Tarik O’Regan. Now, at the start of the 2008 season, the Grammy-nominated choral ensemble is set to captivate audiences across the globe with a recording of those same works by O’Regan. A single listen confirms the impression from last year’s concerts that this choir and composer are exquisitely matched. Conductor Craig Hella Johnson and his company of voices have the skill to voice all the colors in O’Regan’s richly varied musical palette: the densely clustered voices that pull at one another in tense dissonance here and resolve in sumptuous harmonies there, the rhythms that rocket a song along or ease it into a blissful peace. Moreover, they have a feel for the material, for its drama and intensity and the deep spiritual dimension at its foundation. It surges with an insistent, ecstatic joy that shines throughout Conspirare’s latest. This is one meditation on mortality that’s thrillingly alive.Robert Faires, Austin Chronicle
Glowing reports have been floating north about the Austin-based professional choral ensemble Conspirare. Sure enough, this new CD reveals a 37-voice group lovingly polished by artistic director Craig Hella Johnson. Singing of great expressivity is wrapped in the sumptuous acoustics of Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Upstate New York. At least as represented here, the 30-year-old British composer Tarik O’Regan mainly luxuriates in lush washes of piquant harmony. The sounds are very beautiful, to be sure, and a piece like Care Charminge Sleepe achieves real sublimity.Scott Cantrell, Dallas Morning News
Striking, intense, captivating, are all applicable descriptions of the young British composer Tarik O’Regan’s music. O’Regan is a phenomenal choral composer with a language that, whilst thoroughly contemporary and unique, draws from past choral tradition. Perhaps this should be no great surprise given his years at Oxford and Cambridge universities where choral evensong is part of the fabric of life, but there are plenty of Oxbridge-based composers who have left these rich musical pickings untapped. O’Regan’s complex yet elemental-sounding music reaches for the divine with a maturity far beyond what one expects of a composer barely thirty years of age, and his settings work on several levels, translating more than just general mood. Take the two Emily Dickinson stanzas that act as the CD’s bookends. A mere 1’52” and 2’13” in length, every note is weighted with meaning; the dense texture represents the many possible interpretations of Dickinson’s words, whilst the use of a solo tenor and soprano represent the polarities in each poem (”sun” and ”shade”, ”love” and ”hate”). Really, it is musical literary criticism, and I mean that as a compliment because the cleverness of it all doesn’t come at the expense of emotional affect. The success of these works is due in no small part to the technical and interpretational skills of Conspirare, Craig Hella Johnson and the Company of Voices. Their performance is ravishing throughout, and one can only hope that their partnership with O’Regan continues.Charlotte Gardner, BBC Music
With two full-length recordings to his name and a prominent presence on the recent Scattered Rhymes disc, Tarik O’Regan can now justifiably stake a claim as one of the leading British composers of his generation. This is support to an extent by the seven compositions contained on this recording, competently dispatched by Conspirare under the direction of Craig Hella Johnson. At the basis of O’Regan’s style lies a thoroughgoing understanding of both the English choral tradition and medieval music, a knowledge gained from studies at Oxford and Cambridge. But these recent works suggest he casts his net much wider these days.Pwyll ap Siôn, Gramophone Magazine