Gentle Dark [World Premiere Recording]

Gentle Dark is Skylark Vocal Ensemble's World Premiere Recording on love, loss and memory, built around two large-scale works for unaccompanied voices. Gregory W. Brown’s title piece began when he sent artistic director Matthew Guard a single page from James Agee’s A Death in the Family with the note “I have a half a thought to turn this into a requiem.”  It sets the narrator’s meditation before sleep, a six-year-old boy addressing the dark that surrounds him, secure in the certainty that his parents will always be there. Readers know the sudden death of the father lies just beyond the page, so every expression of innocence is lit by loss. Brown moves between triumph and confusion in four movements, and the inevitability of darkness becomes its own kind of comfort.

Eleanor Daley’s Requiem, written in the 1990s and best known for its fourth movement, In remembrance, is presented here complete. It weaves liturgical texts, psalms, the Book of Common Prayer, Revelation and contemporary poetry into a path through grief, remembrance, consolation and hope. The album closes with Brown’s Love Song, a setting of Maggie Dietz that began as the last movement of a work for Constellation Men’s Ensemble and is adapted here for mixed voices. It is a mother’s song of what she gives her child: “I give you sleep, I sing you there.” Recorded at Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts, among an antique automobile collection, the album keeps the natural, intimate acoustic rather than a cathedral’s reverberation, so every breath is audible.

Skylark Vocal Ensemble
Matthew Guard, Artistic Director