Grau: Aqua – Guinand

Water, as an idea, has a way of drowning composers in its own metaphor. Handel knew this, and stayed mostly dry with his fireworks and firework-adjacent barges. Debussy let the sea do the composing for him. Gonzalo Grau, born in Caracas in 1972 and trained — piano, principally — at Berklee before he ever thought of oratorios, takes the wetter, more dangerous route: he lets water be everything at once. Baptism. Flood. Thirst. Grief. The results, captured here in an album of the September 2011 Stuttgart premiere, are as sprawling and as occasionally magnificent as you’d expect from a piece that tries to hold the Ganges and the Rhine in the same cupped hands.

Grau has worked alongside Osvaldo Golijov, whose La Pasión según San Marcos was itself unveiled in Stuttgart back in 2000, a fact that can’t be coincidental to the Bachakademie’s decision to commission this piece eleven years later. That earlier Pasión looms over Aqua the way an older, more famous sibling looms over family gatherings. Both works reach past the European choral tradition into Latin American and Afro-Caribbean rhythm to find their pulse. Both use a large chorus not as commentary but as ritual body. Where Golijov succeeded, though, in fusing his disparate materials into something that felt inevitable, Grau’s oratorio — at nearly seventy minutes — sometimes just accumulates. Water flows; it doesn’t always cohere.

The choral writing, credited separately to Alberto Grau — his father, one assumes, though the skimpy booklet notes won’t confirm it — carries real backbone. Alberto Grau has spent decades as one of Venezuela’s most respected choral pedagogues, and it shows: the Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart, an ensemble built by Helmuth Rilling into one of the great Bach-honed instruments of European choral singing, sounds entirely at home in music that asks it to pivot from a Gregorian “Vidi aquam” into something with the harmonic sway of a spiritual. That transition, right at the opening, is the single most arresting stretch of the whole piece — the antiphon dissolving into syncopation like plainchant remembering it once had a body.

The soloists are a study in deliberate imbalance. Carlos Sánchez Torrealba, the narrator, has a weathered, cracked-at-the-edges voice, perfectly suited to reciting the names of rivers as though they were relatives lost track of. Gioconda Cabrera Colón and Iván García bring an idiomatic warmth that the German choristers, however polished, can only approximate. And then there is Benedikt Hoppe, the boy soprano, dressed — in the photos included with the disc, since the notes offer little else — in white, an angel dropped into a very Venezuelan liturgy. The contrast is the point: German purity of tone against Latin American heat and grain. It’s a smart theatrical stroke even on record, where you can’t see the robes and the raised palms of the choir in what one imagines was a fairly ecstatic close.

Structurally the piece unfolds in five movements. The second, “Invocation of the Rivers,” is the most striking conceptually, if not always the most successful musically. The narrator calls out river names one by one — Volga, Thames, Rhein — while the choir answers with quotations lifted from Eliot, Hölderlin, Mandelstam. A nice bit of literary ecumenism. But in practice it produces some of the driest patches in the score, text painting substituting for musical argument. Grau is clearly more comfortable when the water gets loud: cries, moans, evocations of thirst, the electronic burble of actual water sounds worked into the texture like a fifth voice part. There’s something almost Ligeti-esque, in a homeopathic dose, in how the recorded water noise blurs the line between sound effect and orchestration.

I wish I could tell you exactly what the texts say at every turn, but the trilingual problem here is real: María Fernanda Palacios’s libretto is in Spanish, translated only into German, leaving the Anglophone listener to float along on cognates and context. That’s a pity, because a piece this discursive — moving continent to continent, culture to culture — depends on words landing precisely. Without them you catch the shape of the ritual but not its argument.

Is it a great oratorio? Not for me to say it belongs beside Elijah or the Britten War Requiem — its ambitions are different, more anthropological than devotional, closer in spirit to a Végh or Villa-Lobos folkloric assemblage than to Mendelssohn’s Leipzig pieties. But it is a real piece, alive with specific gravity, and this interpretation — the actual premiere, warts, hall noise, and all — has the conviction of musicians who believed in what they were doing that night in Stuttgart. That counts for a great deal. I’d rather have this vivid, occasionally unwieldy document than a tidier studio remake with all the ecstasy engineered out of it.