Nico Muhly: No Resting Place

The Tallis Scholars and Peter Phillips launch a new partnership with Linn with something a little different: an album of large-scale choral works by Nico Muhly – almost all composed for the group themselves. Apart from their Arvo Pärt collection ‘Tintinnabuli’ (Gimell, 3/15), this marks the first time Phillips and his ensemble have left their home turf of Renaissance polyphony on recording: a vote of confidence in Muhly’s music that’s abundantly justified by the results.

It’s a serious – and seriously impressive – catalogue. There’s no doubt that former chorister Muhly not only understands his forces but is excited and energised by their expressive potential, which he tests and teases to wonderfully contrasting effects. There’s something almost Spem-like about the pulsing waves of sonic light emanating from A Glorious Creature. Ten voices give Muhly space to expand and contract, jumping off from Thomas Traherne’s ecstatic vision of the sun in a work that alternates densely polyphonic episodes – voices fanning out in echoing concentric circles – with chorale-like moments of unity. There’s similar radiance in the tiny Prosperitie – a birthday ‘toast’ for Phillips, set for the same forces, and shot through with an irrepressible little dance, syncopating insistently at its heart.

Most interesting, perhaps, is ‘No Resting Place, Muhly’s take on the Lamentations of Jeremiah. We get the traditional texts and architecture – the Hebrew letters, set melismatically, that open each new verse – but added to these are verbatim statements from members and descendants of the Windrush generation. Biblical abstractions of isolation, destruction, conflict and alienation now cluster around our own recent history, and Muhly leans into this play of distance, supplying music of foreground, first-person drama and emotion for these, while the framing Latin finds a more distant harmonic and narrative abstraction. ‘BETH’, with its solo upper-voices verse section ‘Plorans ploravit’, is surely one of the most ravishing and emotive passages Muhly has written.