Holten Choral Works – Flemish Radio Choir

Conductors who compose are a curious breed — you think first of Furtwängler, laboring over symphonies nobody much wanted to program, or Klemperer’s quartets gathering dust while his Beethoven cycles stayed in print. Bo Holten belongs to a gentler corner of that tradition. He has spent the better part of four decades on the podium, not the piano bench, coaxing sound out of choirs from Copenhagen to London to Brussels. It shows. This is music by someone who knows exactly what forty-odd singers can do to each other in a resonant room, and exactly how far he can push them before the intonation starts to fray.

The revelation here is Römische Elegien. I use that word carefully, because I went in expecting something dutiful. Two of Goethe’s poems, numbers 1 and 5 of the twenty, framed with an obbligato cello that could easily have been a gimmick — I’ve sat through enough new choral works with a “featured” instrumentalist wandering around like a lost tourist, decorative and structurally pointless. Not here. In the first elegy, Rome is a corpse of a city, and Holten’s chorus writing has a bleached, hollowed quality — bare fifths, close clusters that never quite resolve — while Luc Tooten’s cello seems to carry whatever warmth the poet cannot yet feel. By the fifth elegy the poet has found his beloved, and the whole texture turns liquid, almost embarrassingly sensual for a chorus piece; the cello becomes her, singing under and around Joris Derder’s baritone while the choir recedes into something like humid air. Derder sings with an unforced, conversational baritone that never pushes for effect. Exactly right.

Dominus regit me, the Latin setting of Psalm 23, shows the other Holten — the man who has conducted decades of Renaissance polyphony and absorbed its logic into his bones. It opens in genuinely intricate counterpoint, voices entering and answering with real contrapuntal argument, then gradually — you barely notice the seams — collapses into rich, chordal homophony as the psalm’s confidence deepens. It’s a lovely structural idea, simple to describe, hard to execute without sounding schematic. Holten pulls it off.

Cantigas d’amigo, at nineteen minutes the largest piece on the disc, draws on medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric — women’s voices, essentially, mourning or longing for absent men, a genre with its own ancient performing tradition of vocal ornament and drone. Holten doesn’t attempt pastiche archaism, thank goodness; he lets the modal flavor bleed through a harmonic language that’s fundamentally his own, astringent but never ugly. Handel with Care, on the other hand, is a jeu d’esprit — variations on Darwin, punning title and all, over in five minutes, and probably better heard live than dissected on disc.

Then there’s the Mahler. Holten’s arrangement of “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” sits in uneasy company with Clytus Gottwald’s now-famous choral transcription, which has become something of a repertory staple for exactly this reason — critics keep circling back to complain about it. Gottwald strips the piano and turns Rückert’s poem into pure vocal halo, gorgeous, but weirdly depersonalized; there’s no “Ich” left to withdraw from the world, only an ensemble. Holten evidently felt the same irritation I’ve felt listening to Gottwald’s version done by, say, the RIAS Kammerchor — that the piece needs a single voice to make sense of its first-person confession. So he adds one: Johan Reuter, singing the vocal line against unaccompanied choir standing in for Mahler’s orchestra. It’s a good instinct. Reuter sings with dark, unforced tone, entirely persuasive as a soloist. But the surrounding harmonic filling, lovely as individual chords, doesn’t reconstruct Mahler’s orchestral logic. The choir hums and glows without ever quite tracing the harmonic argument that makes the original so devastating. It’s an interesting failure, not a real solution. I’d still send anyone wanting an unaccompanied version back to Gottwald, oddly enough, despite the very objection Holten is trying to fix.

The Flemish Radio Choir, which Holten led as chief conductor from 2008 to 2011, sings all of this with the kind of blended, listening ensemble sound you’d expect from a group that has done nothing but this repertoire under a conductor who trusts them not to oversing. Pitch is remarkably secure throughout music that offers plenty of opportunity to go astray. The engineering favors clarity over church-acoustic wash, which suits Holten’s contrapuntal thinking — you can hear inner voices that a more reverberant album would have blurred into mush.

Not every piece here is equally strong. Rota Veneris runs a bit long for its material, circling ideas that don’t develop so much as recur. But the disc as a whole makes its case. Holten the composer deserves to step out from behind Holten the director more often than he apparently has. This is real music, made by someone who has spent a lifetime listening to choirs breathe.