April 13, 2023 at PDT
Home
It took a mighty effort of will for poet Charles Anthony Silvestri to find the words with which to commemorate his late wife, Julie (Julia Lawrence Silvestri), but the process helped him emerge from the shadow cast by her early death from ovarian cancer. Silvestri’s profoundly personal songs of love and loss form the core of The Sacred Veil, set to music of exquisite beauty by Eric Whitacre, his close friend and frequent collaborator. They stand together with Julie’s own deeply human response to her terminal diagnosis and a closing homage by Whitacre to form a universal story woven from the fabric of individual experience.
The 56-minute work’s dozen movements are mined to their expressive depths by VOCES8, working under the composer’s direction on their debut album together. Home also includes Whitacre’s first work, Go, Lovely Rose, his tender treatment of Kipling’s The Seal Lullaby, Sing Gently, written in 2020 for his Virtual Choir project, and the world-premiere recording of All Seems Beautiful to Me, a sublime setting of lines from Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road.
Home offers a snapshot of Whitacre’s work across 30 years. Its tracklist inspired VOCES8 to raise a new benchmark for ensemble singing, miraculous even by their superlative standards. “I’ve been a fan of VOCES8 for I don’t know how many years, and we’ve been looking for something to do together for almost as long,” Whitacre tells Apple Music Classical. “I was unprepared for their musical intelligence, how they instantly see the deep structure of whatever’s in front of them. They feel it as a group, they talk about it, they work it out, and it just unfolds.”
The Sacred Veil, which includes music for solo piano and cello, required VOCES8 to cede their conductorless status. The ensemble’s co-founder and artistic director Barnaby Smith recalls how Whitacre took command without stifling the natural give and take of its music-making. “One of the most fascinating things about the project was how it burst our bubble as an a cappella group a little and broadened our horizons. It was amazing how little time we spent talking about intonation which, as a group, we naturally have to work hard on. I think that was because everybody was operating in a heightened space, both emotionally and musically. The game just lifted.”
VOCES8 had to overcome the challenge of singing a terminally ill mother’s words and a grieving husband’s innermost reflections on the death of his wife. It was imperative for the singers to engage with the text without letting its strong emotions disturb their voices. “The act of singing can come so painfully close to crying,” comments VOCES8 first soprano Andrea Haines. “Of course, everybody has their own personal connection with the story and are touched by it in different ways. We had to individually navigate that. Our job is to be the vessel for the music so the listener can have that emotional experience. It’s no good if we’re so caught up in the emotions that we can’t evoke them in the right way and meet the technical demands of the piece.”
Whitacre reserves the toughest emotional and musical challenges for his work’s last two movements, the penultimate of which calls for its performers to navigate nine minutes of a cappella singing, deliver keening choral glissandos, and towering multi-voice chords. “It takes them to the extremes of their registers, as high as they can sing, as low as they can sing, so soft, so loud,” says the composer. “Then comes a moment’s silence and another minute of a cappella singing in ‘Child of Wonder’ before the piano comes in. And so the request to them is, ‘OK, you have to stay bang in tune for 10 minutes and take this entire emotional journey.’ And every time we did it, I marveled that technically they’re able to do all of the things that are asked of them.”
16 Tracks
