Writers sometimes design entirely new languages for their fantasy worlds, complete with their own vocabulary, grammar and syntax: JRR Tolkien with Sindarin, Star Trek with Klingon. Similarly, the American composer David Lang (1957) created his own community song for an imaginary religion. His choral work poor hymnala commissioned work for the Dutch Chamber Choir and the NTR Saturday Matinee, functions as a hymnal with fourteen hymns for a fictional religion in which mercy is central. Earlier this month, the recording by the American chamber choir and co-commissioner The Crossing was released. The Dutch premiere followed last Saturday in the Concertgebouw, with the Netherlands Chamber Choir led by Peter Dijkstra, who recently signed on as chief conductor until 2028.
The opening line of poor hymnal paints a picture that is recognizable to every metropolitan: I saw a poor man, he was asking for food, weeping, staring at me. This is followed by no devotional texts addressed to a higher power – the word god appears only twice – but new prayers inspired by texts from the Bible, the Haggadah and from well-known thinkers and leaders, such as Gandhi, Obama and Tolstoy. The music is David Lang through and through: evenly repeating blocks of song, without major dynamic contrasts and unexpected melodic turns, with plenty of room for silence and introspection. It is even more striking when the choir asks loudly as one man: what is mine? what belongs to me? And every now and then a solo voice emerges from the choir, such as in the resigned eleventh movement ‘what remains’, which questions what you leave behind after death (not gold, but good deeds).
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The Netherlands Chamber Choir, which has included quite a few of Lang’s pieces in its repertoire in recent years, carefully builds up its predominantly melodious sound patterns. Lovers of the regularly performed little match girl passionfor which Lang received the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, can indulge in the similar voices flowing in and out in poor hymnal. But the vocal soundscape of this new work is less elaborate; there is real communal singing – it is not without reason that Lang cites old hymns from New England as his inspiration. Still possible poor hymnal also have something distant, almost mechanical, as if a haze of soullessness hangs over the notes. Perhaps the architectural emptiness of the Great Hall also contributes to this and the unifying message of this music comes into its own more in a more intimate ambiance.
And so it may be that you are more affected by what precedes Lang’s music: a first half that thematically and musically forms a beautiful prelude with religiously tinted music by Messiaen, Poulenc and Satie, all three characterized by color-changing sound pillars. With Messiaen’s ‘Prière du Christ montant vers son Père’, part four of his suite L’Ascension (1934) about the ascension of Christ, organist James McVinnie once again plays the Marshal Weather Organ of the Great Hall solo. The voix céleste – a warm, ‘floating’ organ register – carries the solemnly advancing and dazzling fragments of color to a heavenly wonderful world that floats serenely past you. Another peaceful atmosphere resonates in Poulencs Quatre petites prières de Saint François d’Assise (1948). In these miniature prayers, the sublimely merging tenors and basses of the NKK demonstrate how tender a male choir can sound.