Although best known as an interpreter of vocal music of the medieval and Renaissance, Paul Hillier has made memorable recordings of contemporary music, as well, including lusciously transparent recordings of Arvo Pärt with the Hilliard Ensemble and an intriguing exegesis of John Cage's vocal music, Litany for the Whale with the Theatre of Voices. Apparently, Hillier has long harbored a desire to create a purely vocal version of Terry Riley's In C, and this Dacapo disc is the result, with Hiller leading the early music group Ars Nova Copenhagen. The piano "pulse" is transferred to mallet instruments, provided by the Percurama Percussion Ensemble, which also has some limited participation in the main texture. Nevertheless, this In C is "about" the voices, who sing on syllables in part suggested by Riley himself.
It is beautifully recorded by Dacapo, whose engineers capture well the constantly shifting perspective of the voices as they float in and out of the various harmonic fields resulting from Riley's relatively simple chart. Ensemble dynamics are the key to what makes In C work and Hillier explained in the booklet note his sense of disappointment with most other versions of the piece, owing to the mismatched timbres naturally resulting from performances made up of mixed groups of instruments. However, instrumental In Cs are able to operate on their own without a central leader, whereas Hillier clearly has a greater than usual control of the events as they unfold in this performance -- it is a more "shaped" In C than most.
There will be listeners who will go nuts over this recording -- it is certainly a novel idea and a relatively rare example of minimalistic technique as applied to voices. Yet it doesn't seem to gel; there's so much "dubba dubba" in it, it sounds at times like the Swingle Singers on an acid trip. As the percussion has only a limited ability for ensemble dynamics in relation to the voices, there isn't an effective way to blend it with the singing, and often a hole that opens up in the center of the texture, similar to the hole said to be opening up in the ozone layer. Instrumental performances of In C are usually so dense that this is not a common result. It is hard to imagine Hillier misfiring at anything he tries, but his In C seems to demonstrate that in this rare instance his bold conception is too far at odds with the nature of what he's handling to produce a result that works. Nonetheless, for those who want to try, the 55-minute performance is usefully separated into tracks 10 minutes in length, even though the piece itself is presented as continuous.
© TiVo