Gabriel Jackson: Choral Works by Tenebrae

There is a particular kind of choral music that doesn’t announce itself so much as arrive — settling into the room the way light does on a gray afternoon, quiet and transforming. Gabriel Jackson writes that kind of music. He has been doing it for decades now, with a consistency and a seriousness that demands better attention than he generally receives on this side of the Atlantic.

Jackson works squarely within the English choral tradition — Byrd, Tallis, Tavener, Howells are all somewhere in the bloodstream — but to leave it there would be to undersell him badly. His harmonic language is his own. The way he moves voices against each other, the way a chord will open like a door onto unexpected harmonic territory, the way silence itself becomes structural: these are not inherited habits. They are earned convictions.

The Latvian ensemble performing here brings something Jackson’s music specifically needs: a culture of choral singing in which blend and precision are not competing values. Baltic choral traditions — cultivated fiercely through decades of Soviet occupation, kept alive partly because song was the one form of national identity the occupiers couldn’t quite suppress — have produced ensembles with an almost uncanny unanimity of tone. The voices here move as a single body of sound.

“The Voice of the Bard” opens things with real muscle. The rhythmic energy is propulsive, almost aggressive — a statement of intent, not a preamble. What follows, though, is what makes the program worth sustained attention: a long, beautifully managed arc from that opening intensity down to something very nearly motionless, and then back up again toward the close of the first sequence. The homophony that opens “O Doctor optime” creates the kind of stillness after motion that only works when the preceding motion has been genuinely earned. Here it is.

The Missa Triueriensis — the Truro Mass — is in many ways the most conventionally ambitious piece here, and Jackson rises to the occasion without straining. The canonic writing in “Thomas, Jewel of Canterbury” is dense but never muddy; the plainchant references don’t feel like antiquarian gesture but like genuine memory, the way a phrase from childhood will surface unbidden in the middle of adult speech. Jackson threads the familiar through the contemporary without condescension to either.

“Sanctum est verum lumen” is explicitly a homage to Tallis’s Spem in alium — forty parts, the same sonic architecture. It is a brave undertaking. Tallis’s original is one of the most purely overwhelming sonoric experiences in all of Western music; to write in its shadow is to accept a comparison few composers would survive. Jackson largely does survive it, though I’ll admit the structural logic of the piece gets a bit lost in the sheer abundance of effect. The sound is extraordinary. Whether it coheres the way Spem in alium coheres — whether the forty parts are truly functioning as forty parts rather than as a single luxuriant wash — is harder to say. Perhaps that question matters less than it might.

The title work is the disc’s emotional center. The text by Doris Kaerva gives Jackson everything he needs: the Baltic sea, the image of a ship with its sails unfurled, something ancient and elegiac hovering over the whole thing. The vocal writing undulates — there is no other word — with the physical sensation of water. This is where the Latvian singers and Jackson’s imagination meet most completely.

Then there is “Ave regina caelorum,” which introduces an electric guitar. I want to be fair about this. The electric guitar has been used with genuine imagination in contemporary classical contexts — Britten’s contemporaries explored it, and more recently composers like Takemitsu treated the boundary between amplified and acoustic sound as genuinely interesting territory. But here the instrument feels like an intrusion rather than a discovery, a textural novelty that calls attention to itself in ways the music doesn’t quite justify. The singers handle the situation with professional equanimity, but the effect is unsettling in the wrong way.

That is a minor disappointment in a largely distinguished release. Jackson is one of those composers — like Gerald Finzi before him, in a different idiom — who has built an oeuvre of quiet, durable worth. This release honors that work. It will stand.