Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) Review – Tayshaun Sori’s Meditations Slowly Reveal Her Secrets | classical music

M“Chromatic Light (Afterlife)” by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey requires patience. The work, subtitled “Meditation on Morton Feldman’s Rothko Church,” uses a similar ensemble — percussion, keyboards, viola, chorus, and solo voice — and a similarly abstract dialogue of rhythms and tones for Feldman’s 1971 homage to the American painter. But while Feldman’s meditative soundscape lasts a half-hour, the monochromatic lightness stretches across 80 minutes and only reveals in its final bars a second vital pillar in African American spirituality Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Such an outcome is not ideally experienced from a hard pew in a hot church during a week of record temperatures. There were moments between the opening’s barely detectable murmur of tubular bells and its closing revelation of a single line of text for the bass-baritone solo (pieced together section by section over the course of 50 minutes) when I struggled to hold on to a sense of musical architecture, when the twinges of dissonance and scattering of slow-motion instrumental lines began to feel meandering. Other details offered quicker gratification: drumming on bass drum and timpani using candyfloss-tipped sticks; The shimmering brilliance of the marimba bowed over the quiet octave note rare in the mill pond of the chorus; Melismas’s wild baritone bass plunges acrobatically through the sound.

For much of the European premiere of the work at St Giles’ Cripplegate, Surrey himself sat motionless on the podium. He raised his arms only to direct the chorus entries, his movements behind the curves as the BBC singers produced wordless tunes so pure – their blend so clean – they might have been almost composed. This luminous flash set off both the sometimes bold, sometimes raucous, always distinctive vocals of bass baritone Davonne Tynes, and Ruth Gibson’s equally attractive violin playing – the dense tone of some bow strokes, the harsh grip of others and harmonics that summoned up as if there was no bow at all. Positioned on either side of the performance space, George Barton (percussionist) and Siwan Rees (piano and celesta) of the GBSR Duo were in constant communication, tireless in their meticulous exploration of a music that seemed to cherish its own secrets.