The Crossing, International Contemporary Ensemble & Donald Nally - Seven Responses (2017)

This double album, with more than 100 minutes of music, actually represents an excerpt from a group of works that ran much longer in concert: up to three-and-a-half hours. The Seven Responses of the title are just that: compositional responses to Dietrich Buxtehude's oratorio Membra Jesu nostri (1680), a work of Bach-like scope consisting of seven cantatas, each addressed to a single limb of the crucified Jesus. The seven new works alternated in performance by the choir The Crossing with the cantatas of the Buxtehude work. That aspect is lost here, although broadly speaking, the new pieces reflect off of Buxtehude's mid-Baroque style in one way or another. Each composer was given the latitude to work with his or her own librettists, resulting in a great variety of treatments. Consider Ad cor, by the late Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, where mockery is the aspect of the crucifixion addressed: the composer sets fragments of text like "I laugh at you mockingly." The composers come from many countries, but the program is framed by works of two Americans, a hot newcomer, Caroline Shaw, and a veteran, Lewis Spratlan, whose text is ecological in orientation. Shaw's work merges Baroque, medieval, and minimalist strands in a wholly novel way, with passages that almost seem to quote Philip Glass but diverge in ultimate effect. With some space available on both CDs, the compilers might have included the Buxtehude in at least excerpted form in order to show something of the stimulus for the contemporary composers. But this is an entirely novel work, quite convincingly performed by the musicians who commissioned it. Review by James Manheim