Chronicle Review Corner

This is a choral album for readers who like their singing—especially those who sing.

Initial listening suggested something a little lightweight. I was going to write something withering about the King’s Singers, who in their heyday used to be on the radio on a Sunday night—a kind of Home Service easy-listening singing (Bob Chilcott was a member from 1985 to 1997, and they’re still going). But it can’t just be me who heard them as the harbinger of Sunday doom: bath night and back to school.

However, for reasons you don’t need to know, I was diverted into other listening, and when I came back to this it seemed more sacred than before—and to have developed more depth. God moves, etc. He probably does like His massed choirs.

The easy-listening feel comes from decades of work with the Greenwood Music Camp and other ensembles, where presumably young people need something not too hard to learn fairly quickly. The album draws from a collection that spans Lister’s evolution as a composer, though it’s not chronological.

Lister seems to excel at music that is simple on the surface, but the more one listens, the more depths emerge. (If depths can emerge—they’d be shallows if they rose to the surface.)

Opener “Toward a Supreme Fiction” feels very American, perhaps with shades of Copland. The text itself (a poem) is abstract, so Lister does well to make it concrete.

The “Of Mere Being” texts that follow are easier to follow in places—”A Clear Day and No Memories” opens with: “No soldiers in the scenery / No thoughts of people now dead / As they were fifty years ago.” Others are less so. The snowman, for instance, is not about a jolly carrot-faced chap but a man earnestly dissociating himself from emotion so he can deal with the reality of life (maybe).

The later “To the Harbormaster” appears not to be about a ruddy-faced gent on the dockside, but a person searching for refuge of the soul.

Easy to listen to, but full of texture, nuance, and depth.

Out on Métier, MEX 77111.

—Jem Condliffe