“Veni Sancte Spiritus,” the first section from my Vespers, showed up on The Early Music Show April 21st on BBC Radio 3. Lucie Skeaping profiled Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, and among Weelkes, Finck, and Susato, there I am, with Joan, Bob, and The Crossing. Thanks, BBC, thanks, Piffaro!
Piffaro uploaded this to YouTube, with images mostly from the NYC concert, and audio excerpts:
Live performances of Vespers, The Waking Sun, and Where Flames a Word will be on the radio this weekend:
Sunday, January 22, 2012
3:00 – 5:00 PM
WRTI – 90.1FM, Philadelphia
and online anywhere: www.wrti.org
From The Crossing: “Vespers, the work that brought Kile Smith into our lives and hearts, recorded live in concert at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill on Sunday January 8th, 2012 in a joyful collaboration with Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, will be the first broadcast in a series of live Crossing concerts on WRTI, 90.1FM, Philadelphia.
The remainder of the program will include two pieces The Crossing commissioned from Kile, 2009′s Where flames a word, for our Celan Project, and 2011′s The Waking Sun for our Seneca Sounds Project.”
Donald and I will briefly discuss the music. But it’s mostly the music.
In “Masterpiece brings packed house Sunday to Hill church,” Michael Caruso called the 2008 premiere of Vespers “a masterpiece of composition within the context of religious devotion,” singling out as “most impressive” my “commitment to the powerful traditions of German Lutheran piety as expressed in music.”
He then says about Sunday’s (Jan. 8th) performance, that the “marvel of Smith’s music is found in its ability to sound both old and new at one and the same time. The timbres of Piffaro’s Renaissance instruments and the straight-tone singing of The Crossing recall the music of centuries ago, as does Smith’s sophisticated use of contrapuntal techniques.”
Caruso rightly praises Donald Nally, who “elicited flawless singing and exuberant playing from his musicians.”
Tom Purdom likes Vespers even more the second time around, in the Broad Street Review. Giving well-deserved raves to all the musicians for a performance that “actually exceeded” the premiere, he says, “the real basis of its success was the quality of Smith’s work. You can listen to first-class pieces more than once because they evoke deep feelings and present you with music so varied and complex that you hear new things every time you listen to them.”
He describes “a deeply spiritual quality from beginning to end,” saying that “variety and complexity” carry the piece with imagination, marveling, again, at the genius of the musicians to pull it off.
Having written, most of my life, simple music for amateur choirs, it’s an irony to have complexity singled out. In any case, I believe in writing for the musicians, and I’m delighted to no end that Vespers is such a great match for the superlative forces of Piffaro and The Crossing.
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daniel Webster reviews Vespers in the first of its three 2012 reprise concerts. He calls it “a tangy, new-old gloss on a historic form” becoming, in German and Latin, “like musical conversation among friends.”
He writes that “Smith’s harmonic vocabulary ranges widely, demands keen ears, and gives vitality to texts that can invite routine. A single voice, moving in consonance, is joined by another on an edgily different route, then by others until the vision emerges of a crowd jostling, before a resolution unpredictably appears. No assumptions can be rewarded in this writing, for surprise is everywhere.”
He points to the weaving of lines, voices, textures, and dynamics that “craftily prepare for the work’s climax, in the Magnificat, to reach a doubly dramatic forte. That section, beginning with single high soprano voices, grew to a tumult, and included historical musical references and gestures to summarize the entire work’s premise.”
He rightly praises Piffaro and The Crossing for their work in creating the “sonic novelty” of transparency and ever-changing mixtures. “Piffaro’s seven musicians play so many instruments that it is, by turns, a discrete group of plucked strings, a sweet wind ensemble, or even a rowdy band of sackbuts stomping through the fields. To hear a finely tuned interval in the voices supported by a small harp, guitar, and theorbo is to stand near the center of music itself.”
And again, “Piffaro’s players are magicians in stirring fresh sounds for the work…. Listeners could hear every line and interval within that transparent singing.”
Webster continues, “the color and densities of the setting of Herr Christ, der einig Sohn, and Psalm 27 anchored the structure of the whole. Smith’s music seems to rejoice in meeting old forms and greeting them like new friends.”
