Naresh Sohal (1939-2018)
Vocal and Instrumental Music
Recording details not specified
Texts and translations included
Reviewed from a WAV download 44.1kHz/16-bit
Heritage HTGCD122-3 [152]

Eight of the eleven pieces on this new set of vocal and instrumental music by Naresh Sohal were written in the early 1970s. This was clearly an important and formative time for Sohal as a composer. One gets a clear sense of truly impressive creativity and experimentation from all of these works, even if the impact on the listener is variable. There’s also a discernible pattern of development and formation. Perhaps this is most easily observable in the two orchestral works Aalaykhyam I and II. Composed two years apart, one moves from the noticeable influence of Messiaen and the textural dependence on the use of aleatoricism (chance elements) in the episodic Aalaykhyam I to something rather more interesting in Aalaykhyam II, where there’s more sense of organic development of the material, so there is less scenic shifting, the aleatoricism feels less self-aware, and the instrumental grouping more confident and coherent. In this last piece, it’s easy to recognise the authoritative orchestral composer featured on the two previous Heritage releases I reviewed last year (here and here). I’ll confess to being surprised that the English Chamber Orchestra were used for Aalaykhyam II rather than the London Sinfonietta as in Aalaykhyam I, but they sound as assured in 1972 as the contemporary specialists do in 1970. Having the same conductor in Andrew Davis—a tireless champion of Sohal’s music—is clearly a major factor.

Davis also conducts the Ambrosian Singers in Surya, also from 1970. This is a setting of Sanskrit verses celebrating the Sun and nature as sacred. It’s scored for 53 voices, flute and percussion, and each singer is treated as a soloist. It’s divided into two sections: texture-based passages, reminiscent of Ligeti and Xenakis, and writing inspired by Hindu rhythms. It receives a committed performance, almost hypnotic in its power, and it’s unsurprising that it proved one of Sohal’s most popular pieces at the time.

The other vocal works in the collection are dominated by settings of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. By far the most successful to my ears is Poems of Tagore II taken from his collection The Fugitive. It’s scored for two mezzo-sopranos and cello and was commissioned by the English Bach Festival in 1972. There’s a wonderful contrast sustained between the writing for cello with its use of artificial harmonics and the two voices, initially singing very quietly, a contrast paralleled by the poet’s initial ecstatic memory of first love and his reflection on how that has since been ‘muffled’ by the quotidian. Sarah Walker and Margaret Cable make the most of Sohal’s imaginative word painting and the cello is played with exquisite judgement by Rohan de Saram. There are two slightly earlier Tagore settings also included, both featuring Jane Manning. Neither Kavita 1 nor Night’s Poet made quite the same impression on me. In both I struggled with the timbral balance between instrumentation and voice, and also Manning’s rendition—without the words in front of you, it’s very hard to make out what she’s singing, which is an obvious problem. Some of the instrumental writing also feels a little less accomplished, as if Sohal is uncertain of the effect he is seeking. The final Tagore setting from the 1970s, Inscape, also strikes me as an interesting but unsuccessful experiment. A later work than the other settings, composed at the end of the decade, it’s scored for choir, solo flute, percussion and electronics. I found it almost too full of compositional ideas, so that a coherent musical image of Tagore’s poem never forms: in the midst of the use of devices like tape delays, ritualistic rhythms, ring modulation, and aleatoricism, I longed for some anchoring or orientation. I should say though that the performance by the then recently formed Singcircle under Gregory Rose is astonishingly skilful.

The other 1970s pieces in the collection are again of interest in forming a picture of Sohal’s contemporary compositional preoccupations. Chiaroscuro I from 1970 was written for the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and is predicated on viewing the brass quintet as set of differentiated textures revolving around light and shadow and also sonically—especially towards its end—between where sound ends and silence begins. It’s a fascinating piece. I also very much enjoyed Hexad, written in 1971, where it seems to me that Sohal‘s choice of instruments (flute, horn, percussion, violin, cello, double bass) and their relative colouration is just perfect. The excellent booklet notes by Utsyo Chakraborty describe some of the movements of the piece as ‘essays in sonority’ and I think that’s absolutely right, revolving as they do inventively in turn around xylophone, suspended cymbal and bowed triangle with piccolo. The work’s final movement is masterly, the London Contemporary Players revelling in its opportunities and vivacity.

Finally, two more recent pieces again show how Sohal continued to develop decades later. The understandable preoccupation with Tagore was still there in 1993 when he composed The Unsung Song. This setting for mezzo-soprano and ensemble was commissioned by New Music Concerts, Toronto and feels if not a world apart, then some distance from those 1970s compositions. It flows much more naturally than the early Tagore compositions and beautifully captures the poignancy of the poet’s lines about a life which has not yet achieved a sense of spiritual fulfilment: ‘The song that I came to song remains unsung to this day/…I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice/…I live in the hope of meeting with him; but that meeting is not yet’. The two part contrapuntal writing in a slow moving work very much emphasises Tagore’s theme of continual anxiety about readiness—checking and rechecking one’s life—and the tenderness of some of the music is deeply touching. I don’t agree with Chakraborty that the music is ‘grim’ (he doesn’t mean it pejoratively) rather I’d say it’s characterised by a profound dignity, where hope offsets any sense of pain. It’s very well performed here by Elizabeth Turnbull and New Music Concerts Canada directed by Bob Aitken.

Finally, we have Foray, a work from 2006 for cello and piano, commissioned by the BBC, and premiered at the Spitalfields Festival. A good choice for the last work on the set, it’s altogether of a brighter hue than a lot of the works that have preceded it, especially its concluding Allegro which at places has something almost exuberant about it and satisfyingly ends with both instruments in C major, something that feels not unlike the warmth of Stravinsky’s Symphony in that key—indeed, there are a lot of lovely Stravinskian moments in the piece as a whole. It’s not fanciful I think to see this as a work in which Sohal has come to a more serene place than hitherto in his career. He has again been lucky in his performers, Rohan de Saram and Ananda Surkalan who capture the aesthetic and spiritual sensibility of the work with great care from the start.  

Yet again I’ve found the intense focus on Sohal’s music provided by this set to be immensely rewarding. If I haven’t responded to all the works with equal levels of enthusiasm, I should affirm that every piece on this disc has fascinating elements which anybody already familiar with the composer will respond to. On that point however, if I was new to Sohal’s music I don’t know if I would start here. Either of those two earlier Heritage orchestral recordings mentioned above are perhaps a better point of departure or the excellent Toccata Classics disc of most of the string quartets (review).

In general, the recorded sound for all of the works here is fine: there are slight balance issues in a couple of the earlier vocal recordings where I would have liked the soloist to be more prominent, but in general the BBC recordings which Heritage has mastered are good. No details of exactly when or where they were made or broadcast have been included, which is a pity. (I assume the recording of The Unsung Song originated with the CBC and was subsequently broadcast here by the BBC.) I’ve already commented on the quality of Utsyo Chakraborty’s notes and there is an informative biographical essay too by Sohal’s widow, Janet Swinney. Texts for all the poems are helpfully provided, except for The Unsung Song for some reason. I’m starting to quibble and should stop because actually Heritage deserves our profound gratitude for the initiative they’re showing in bringing the works of a neglected and important voice back to our attention.

Dominic Hartley

Contents
Night’s Poet (1971)
Jane Manning (soprano); Alan Hacker and Edward Pillinger (clarinets);
Peter Seymour (percussion)
Poems Of Tagore II (1972)
Sarah Walker and Margaret Cable (mezzo sopranos); Rohan de Saram (cello)
Kavita 1 (1970)
Jane Manning (soprano) & Nash Ensemble
Inscape (1979)
Singcircle; Gregory Rose
The Unsung Song (1993)
Elizabeth Turnbull (mezzo soprano); New Music Concerts, Canada; Bob Aitken
Surya (1970)
Ambrosian Singers; Andrew Davis
Aalaykhyam1 (1970)
London Sinfonietta; Andrew Davis
Aalaykhyam 2 (1972)
English Chamber Orchestra; Andrew Davis
Hexad (1971)
London Contemporary Players
Chiaroscuro 1 (1970)
Northern Brass Ensemble; Lionel Friend
Foray (2006)
Rohan de Saram (cello); Ananda Surkalan (piano)

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