Panufnik Choral Works – Joyful Company of Singers

Roxanna Panufnik comes by her ear for sacred sonority honestly — her father Andrzej fled Poland with a suitcase full of manuscripts and a horror of Soviet cultural bureaucracy, and something of that hard-won independence survives in the daughter’s music, refracted through an entirely different sensibility. Where Andrzej could be craggy, even forbidding, Roxanna writes music that wants to be loved. Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes the wanting shows a little too plainly.

This reissue — and reissue is the operative word, since nothing here is new even by the modest standards of 2003 — gathers a decade’s worth of choral and liturgical work, most of it well made, some of it genuinely arresting. The Westminster Mass anchors the program. Commissioned for the seventy-fifth birthday of Cardinal Basil Hume, it sets the Roman Catholic liturgy in English, in the Catholic order, but swaps out the Credo for a motet, Deus meus, and tacks a memorial acclamation on after the Benedictus. That’s an unusual formal decision, and it pays off. The Agnus Dei is the highlight of the whole disc — the trebles of Westminster Cathedral float that final invocation with a kind of unaffected purity that only comes from boys who have no idea how remarkable they sound. James O’Donnell, never a director to over-massage a phrase, lets the acoustic of the cathedral do quiet, patient work. You can hear the stone in it.

Panufnik’s harmonic language owes something to Pärt, something to Tavener, and something to the Orthodox chant tradition her Polish ancestry only glancingly touches. The Douai Missa Brevis carries those Orthodox ghosts most audibly: long modal lines, parallel motion, a kind of processional stillness. It’s the most formally satisfying piece here, tightly argued for something so brief.

Where the composer runs into trouble is melody. She has, by her own evident preference, subordinated tune to color — which works beautifully when the harmonic surface is doing something genuinely new, and works less well when you find yourself waiting for a theme that never quite crystallizes. Spring, her Hopkins setting, wants for that thematic backbone. The poem’s ecstatic tumble of “weeds, in wheels” imagery deserves music with more melodic thrust; instead we get atmosphere, elegant but slightly becalmed. The Prayer fares better. There’s a passage of genuine harmonic loveliness about two minutes in, a suspension that resolves so gently you almost miss it.

Angels sing!, the set of four Polish carols, was written for children in Ealing — a detail the liner notes decline to mention, which is a pity, because it matters. These are not easy pieces. The intervals are treacherous, the rhythms syncopated in ways that would trip up conservatory sopranos, let alone parish choristers. The Joyful Company of Singers under Peter Broadbent dispatch them with a polish that almost obscures how difficult they are — a compliment and a mild demerit at once; one wants to sense a little more of the terror in the tightrope-walk. Jeremy Filsell’s organ accompaniments are inventive throughout, harmonically sly, though the engineers have placed him at such a remove, down the nave it sounds like, that some of his coloristic detail gets swallowed by reverberation.

The real find is the latest piece, “The Christmas life,” a 2002 setting of Wendy Cope. Here, finally, melody and harmony fuse into something whole: a tune of real, almost startling beauty, dissonance handled with the sureness of a composer who has stopped worrying about being modern enough and simply written what she heard. It’s a shame, then, that the solo singing lets it down. Whoever prepared the soloist did the piece no favors; the line wants more presence, more sheen, and instead gets tentativeness.

None of which should discourage the curious. There is no direct rival disc that gathers quite this repertoire in one place, and the performances, Westminster Cathedral’s contribution especially, justify the disc’s continued existence on the shelf. But full texts and proper documentation matter for music this recently written and this little known — a listener deserves to know what Deus meus actually is, why the Mass exists, whom the carols were written for. Their absence here is a real loss, not a pedantic quibble. The music, on its best days — the Agnus Dei, the Douai Missa Brevis, that gorgeous Cope setting — argues for itself regardless. On its lesser days, you wish Panufnik trusted her gift for tune as much as she trusts her ear for chord.