Canter Bridge

If Maestro John Nelson did not exist, he would have to be invented as a matter of the highest artistic urgency. How else would the rest of us become acquainted with the new or little-known music that is so often recorded under his baton?

Take, for example, the Polish composer Henry Mikolaj Gorecki’s ‘Beatus Vir’, ‘Totus Tuus’, and Old Polish Music. The first of these are newer creations of a very Catholic Poland, redolent of biblical and Roman Catholic piety embedded in the brooding harmonies of Old Poland.

Nelson allows the brooding to occur with a capital ‘B’ in what is simply profoundly gorgeous music. Gorecki excels at easing out of repetition all the transcendent meaning that it contains, aided in this task by Nikita Storojev’s canyon-esque bass. Under Nelson’s command, both orchestra and choir swell at just the right Slavic moments. Simply put, this is jaw-dropping music meant to be listened to at considerable volume.

Old Polish Music is a stirring surprise, in part because there is so little old about it. Old themes are reworked substantially and set to, among other things, some startling writing for brass.

This reviewer is rarely stopped dead in his tracks by the sheer awesome beauty of a little-known work. The three Gorecki creations on this disk all do the stopping.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the loss to the Western canon that was absorbed in having tarried so long in making Gorecki’s acquaintance, nor the joy of the feast now that the fast has been broken.