Most classical music listeners know Paul Hillier as a tireless champion of choral music, from Josquin to Arvo Pärt. On a recently-released recording from Dutch national label Dacapo (distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Naxos of America), the hardest working man in choral music focused on tackling Terry Riley’s In C, a piece that’s not typically known as a standard work for chorus, with the Dutch group Ars Nova Copenhagen.
In C (1964) is an improvisatory piece consisting of fifty-three individual motivic fragments that any group of musicians can use as the basis for their performance. In the liner notes, Hillier explains that, for him, the piece is essentially a contrapuntal work in which “performers are being invited to create polyphony on the spur of the moment.” Hillier had noticed that most previous recordings of In C were for instruments with different timbral characteristics that kept individual lines distinct. In contrast, Hillier felt that the limited timbral range of a chorus would encourage people to hear patterns between the music that each performer was singing.
The result of Hillier’s work with Ars Nova Copenhagen is a stellar re-invention of a minimalist classic, one of two “iconic masterpieces” of the 1960s, according to Hiller (the other is Stockhausen’s Stimmung). Joshua Kosman described the performance as “a multicolored choral melange . . . the effect is stupendous.” Riley himself thought “the performance was really great and the voices sound so beautiful and so engaged with the music . . . I am so grateful and honored that you (Hillier) are the one coming up with the definitive vocal version of the piece.”
In September 2006, Dacapo released John Taverner’s “Western Wind” Mass performed by Ars Nova Copenhagen and Paul Hillier. David Vernier of ClassicsToday.com, in another glowing “10/10″ review, wrote that the recording was “one of the most sonorous, sensitively balanced, and interpretively satisfying renditions of John Taverner’s ‘Western Wind’ Mass to appear on disc.”
Led by Hillier since 2002, Ars Nova Copenhagen is Scandinavia’s leading vocal ensemble, specializing in both early and contemporary music. Other chief conductors have included Bo Holten and Tamás Vetö. For more information on Ars Nova Copenhagen, please visit www.arsnova.dk.
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