Conspirare & Craig Hella Johnson - Tarik O'Regan: Threshold Of Night (2008)

London-born composer Tarik O'Regan was only 30 when the second CD devoted to his choral music, Threshold of Night: Music for Voices and Strings, was released. The works collected here show him to have an assured, individual voice; consummate technique as a choral composer; and an ability to create complex music that's not "difficult," that has an immediately sensual appeal. O'Regan's harmonic language is rooted in tonality, but it is richly saturated with chromaticism. He uses dissonance in the old-fashioned way, creating tension that finds satisfying, if unconventional, resolution. The result is sometimes astonishingly new sounding, but it establishes a direct emotional connection that's hard to resist. In The Ecstasies Above, a setting of three mystical texts by Edgar Allan Poe, O'Regan accompanies the voices with a string quartet, and the result is by turns rhapsodic, folksy, and ethereal, but it has a compelling musical coherence. That sure sense of musical architecture is a key part of the success of his work; the harmonic language may be dense but it's securely moored in a gratifyingly clean musical structure. The prevailing mood of these works is a sort of exalted serenity; the title, The Ecstasies Above, would be as apt a title for the album as Threshold of Night. Craig Hella Johnson leads the choral ensemble Conspirare and Company of Strings in luminous performances of O'Regan's music. The singers' immaculate intonation makes the music's broad color spectrum glisten with clarity. The sound of the SACD is clean and vibrant, with just enough resonance. -- Stephen Eddins