VOICES
Jürg Frey

EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble

James Weeks

JÜRG FREY

1-4. Out of Chorales (2017-2018)
score (pdf)

5. Polyphonie der Wörter (1998)
score (pdf)

6. Shadow and Echo and Jade (2014-2016)
score (pdf)

7. Landscape of Echoes (2019)
score (pdf)

8. Blue Bird’s Tune (2021-2022)
score (pdf)

9. Because I could not stop for Death (2021-2022)
score (pdf)

EXAUDI

James Weeks, conductor

World Premiere Recording

Total time: 67:31

Recorded in 3D format (Dolby Atmos 7.1.4), surround sound (5.1) and stereo (2.0)

BUY ALBUM

CD + Booklet — HD Digital format included — 21,90€

HD Digital — Stereo and Surround 5.1, 24bit 96kHz — 14€

Digital — Stereo, 16bit 48kHz — 10€

More info about formats here

Also available on Bandcamp [HD Digital].

Voices in the borderland

Sound. Silence. A quiet chord. A fragment of melody. Silence.

Listening to Jürg Frey’s music, a calm settles on us. Calm, but not a daze; rather, a heightened attentiveness, an expanded awareness of the world which lies around us and permeates us. The threshold of sound illuminates the threshold of the self.

The special qualities of Frey’s music have been recognised and celebrated for many years, but until recently the voice was a rare presence in his work. In 2016 EXAUDI commissioned its first piece from him, Shadow and Echo and Jade; immediately it revealed a unique emotional climate, the voices fragile against the backdrop of silence, then radiant and transfigured in the final, shimmering coda. Inspired by this, more pieces followed, the collaboration drawing both composer and ensemble deeper into this focused, intimate vocal world.

Each piece takes a distinct approach. Whereas Shadow and Echo and Jade inhabits an expansive, open terrain at the extreme edge of sound, Out of Chorales is a more compact suite of four short movements, each exploring a single texture, harmonic material or process. Landscape of Echoes is a mesmerically cycling structure of regular, seven-bar phrases, into which voices are added or subtracted with each repetition, conjuring the resonating spaces of its title.

Both of these pieces use texts from Frey’s personal word-hoard, each line as evocative as its music:

Late lost colors
Traces in the borderland
Slight wind and summer light

Winterwhite
Winterwhite

By contrast, Polyphonie der Wörter – the earliest piece and the only one not to have its genesis in the collaboration with EXAUDI – takes a more ambivalent approach to text, seeking to dissolve meaning into phonetic sound by superimposing words on top of each other, until the music seems suddenly to coalesce into a single, sustained sound: pure voice, free of semantic association.

The final two works set Emily Dickinson, whose spiritual transcendentalism accords closely with Frey’s own temperament. Blue Bird’s Tune, written as an open-score work for amateur performers, overlays tonal harmony with a cloud of indeterminate pitch, gradually clarifying towards the centre before obscuring again in ‘cordial mystery’. More substantial is the most recent work, Because I could not stop for death, a slow-turning processional over a repeating ground. Both elements are articulated by different texts – the processional by Dickinson’s dreamlike cortège, the ground by a poem of Bai Juyi (772 – 846), concerning the repeated regrowth of grass. Here, Frey’s extraordinary ability to create unexpected, revelatory harmonic progressions from the most familiar materials is channelled into a deeply moving journey, freighted with the premonition of mortality yet – like Dickinson’s poem – suspended in lightness.

These pieces make exceptional demands on their interpreters, who must place themselves on a threshold, just as the music does: not only navigating the border between the softest possible sound and silence, but in so doing, also navigating the border of their individual technical and expressive vocal identities. With the voice, more than with instruments, one cannot remain invulnerable on that border: it is a place of risk, fragility, and self-exposure. But to take that risk, as Frey invites us in these remarkable works, is to encounter the world through new eyes and ears, a world in which these quiet voices, immanent and embodied, reveal our inextricable human indwelling – our Dasein, our being-there – within it.

JAMES WEEKS

CREDITS

Recorded at

Temple Church, London, UK

July 2022

Composed by

Performed by

Emma Tring, soprano
Juliet Fraser, soprano
Cathy Bell, mezzo
Jessica Gillingwater, mezzo
David de Winter, tenor
Stephen Jeffes, tenor
Ben McKee, bass
Jimmy Holliday, bass
James Weeks, director

Liner notes

Video shooting

Sophie Sparkes

Graphic Art Direction

Lorena Alonso

Music production and sound

Recording assistant

Nicholas Moroz

Mixed and mastered with

Produced by

Santi Barguñó

Recording Voices · Photos

EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, James Weeks, Jürg Frey, Voices

Voices · Album Images

EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, James Weeks, Jürg Frey, Voices

REVIEWS

“The ensemble’s precision, gauzy beauty, and harmonic mastery have rarely sounded so otherworldly, and this new collection suggests the combination of Frey and Exaudi is a perfect marriage. (…) An incredible achievement.” The Best Contemporary Classical Music. Read here

BANDCAMP, Peter Margasak

“A new CD from EXAUDI is a guaranteed treat for all the senses: the sound quality is always impeccable, the CD presentation a tactile pleasure. (…) an intriguing mixture of the sophisticated and the almost naïve, a surface simplicity revealing submerged depths, a place where fragility and steely inner purpose meet. It is music that is extreme in its singlemindedness, the long spans over which gradually evolving musical material is presented is essential to its effect.” Read here

THE ARTS DESK, Bernard Hughes

“It could only be the work of Jürg Frey, the Swiss composer with that perfect knack for imprinting sound on silence like footprints impacting on pristine snow. A definitive new Jürg Frey album is just out from the UK vocal ensemble EXAUDI.” Listen here

BBC NEW MUSIC SHOW, Kate Molleson

“EXAUDI to jeden z najlepszych zespołów wokalnych, jakie kiedykolwiek słyszałem. A utwory Freya należą do najbardziej wymagających. Niewiele, nawet bardzo dobrych chórów, sięgając po ten repertuar, wyszłoby obronną ręką. (…) Poznanie tego albumu dało mi niezapomniane chwile szczęścia.” Album of the week. Read here

W KULTURALNY SPOSÓB, Robert Majewski

“Seit 2016 hat der heute 71-jährige Aarauer mit dem herausragenden Vokalensemble Exaudi unter James Weeks diese weich atmende Musik an der Grenze zur Stille entwickelt. Wer sich ihr überlässt, hört die Welt anders.” Read here

KULTURTIPP, Cécile Olshausen

“La música de Frey se muestra en toda su desnuda radicalidad” Read here

DIARIO DE SEVILLA, Pablo J. Vayón

“On the Neu imprint, which I cited briefly in a recent column about labels producing consistently covet-worthy releases, comes Voices, a breathtaking collection of vocal works by Jürg Frey performed by the U.K. vocal ensemble EXAUDI. Exalted in every sense, this one’s essential listening.” Read here

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, Steven Smith

“Jeśli jednak muzyka Estończyka jest zaklętą w quasichorałowych melodiach oraz rozłożonych trójdźwiękach Ewangelią, to czym mogą być rozciągnięte w czasie, lodowate, lekko skrzące się harmonie wokalne Szwajcara? Ja słyszę – banalną, gdy zostaje wypowiedziana, ale nie, gdy się jej doświadcza – dojmującą pustkę, która zieje ostateczną tajemnicą.” Read here

RUCH MUZYCZNY, Michał Mendyk

“Abraçar tots aquests riscos (d’una bellesa corprenedora) tal com ens convida a fer Frey en aquestes obres singulars és endinsar-se en una nova manera de veure i d’escoltar, com si el món s’oferís de nou, revelat per unes veus callades, immanents i profundament corporals.” Read here

SONOGRAMA, Marçal Borotau

“Estas piezas habitan la frontera entre el sonido y el silencio, en ese límite, la voz se muestra muy vulnerable y abierta, pero justamente en ese riesgo radica su fuerza. Frey nos invita a experimentar el mundo con una nueva sensibilidad, revelando en esas voces sutiles una resonancia profundamente humana, una presencia encarnada en el aquí y ahora de nuestra existencia.” Read here

REVISTA RITMO, Joan Gómez Alemany

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

EXAUDI and Neu Records wish to thank the following patrons of this recording for their generosity:

Aargauer Kuratorium

Hans und Lina Blattner Stiftung

Ruth Almgill, Anna and Mike Appleton, Athena, Andreas, and Erika Bächli-Hinz, Daniel Becker, Sam Belinfante, Lotte Betts-Dean, François Bohy, Libby Burgess, Stephen Chase, Peyee Chen, Laurence Crane, Nicholas Croft, Steven Daverson, Rüdi Debrunner, Matthias Dieterle, Heather Dix, Lawrence Dunn, David de Winter, Christopher Fox, Jeremy Fraser, Juliet Fraser, Adrian Frey, Jürg Frey, Helen Geissberger, Leo Grant, Paolo Griffin, Robin Haigh, Michael Halls, Edu Haubensak, Fritz Hauser, Graham Hayter, Bernd Herzogenrath, Daryl Jamieson, Colin Johnson, Evan Johnson, Seth Josel, Ron Keefe, Simone Keller, Matthew Lee Knowles, Catherine Kontz, Nelica La Gro, Jack Leightcap, Niels Lous & ‘Tricia Buckley, John McLeod, Tanja Masanti, Ian Mikyska, Kathy Nicholson, Christoph Nicolaus, Sadhyo Niederberger, Miranda Page Wood, Julian Philips, Eleri Pound, Iain Rhodes, Martin Riesen & Veronika Baumgartner, Petra Ronner, Martyn Schmidt, Michael Schneider, Marianne Schuppe, Erich Schwyter, Craig Shepard, Laura Sheldon, Christine Shone, Andreas Stahl, Dominique Starck, Thomas Stiegler, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Emma Tring, Serge Vuille, John Weeks, Sam Wigglesworth, Robin Wills, Michael Worboys, Yuko Zama, Joseph Zitt.

VOICES Jürg Frey