On track: Harmony in Baltic manner

By WILLIAM DART

Einojuhani Rautavaara's Suite de Lorca was one of the standout items at a New Zealand Youth Choir concert - now the same work is the centrepiece of an exciting new collection of choral music by composers from Estonia, Latvia, Sweden and Finland.

Baltic Voices I is the first of an ongoing series of collaborations between the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Paul Hillier. This American conductor is a man who has no concept of musical borders; he's as happy with medieval minnesingers as with the modern minimalists.

The Estonian singers have just the right voices for this repertoire, especially when it comes to those dark, luminous basses. Twenty-five voices catch Rautavaara's freewheeling theatre to its last shriek and gasp, and bring a sumptuous gleam to Sven-David Sanstrom's revisiting of a Purcell anthem.

The premiere recording of Arvo Part's Which was the son of might be the chief attraction for some. The piece tracks the lineage of Jesus through generation after generation back to God himself, in a style that could be described as offbeat gospel.

The final track, Peteris Vask's Dona nobis pacem, with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, is a meditative experience.

There's the same sense of protected space and inner calm in much of Music of the Gothic Era, a reissue through Archiv Blue. Two CDs for the price of one - in a distinctive plastic case tinted Bombay Gin blue - is a bargain, and when the music is a selection from the 13th and 14th centuries, conducted by the late David Munrow, it's an offer to be searched out.

Thirty years after the recording's original release, the music appears in new perspectives. The mysterious choral pieces of Leonin and Perotin are like the medieval equivalent of trance music.

Machaut's Lasse! Comment oublieray, with its strange, bent harmonies, could be a 14th-century acappella blues, while an anonymous Clap, Clap par un matin would grace any Womad line-up.

For many of us, back in 1976 this release revealed a new world. In 2003, it is no less of a revelation.

* Baltic Voices (Harmonia Mundi HMU 907311); Music of the Gothic Era (Archiv Blue 471 731-2)