Underrated Classical Musicians 3/12/20

It feels incredibly odd to keep going to plan when Götterdämmerung seems everywhere, but it's nice to have a place of normalcy. 

So today we'll talk about the extremely old sounding music of an old favorite of mine: Cyrillus Kreek. His Psalm settings are some of the glories of choral music, but again, it's in Estonian, a language no singer is ever taught, so how many people even know about him outside Estonia? He was a contemporary of Bartok's and, surprise surprise, collected lots of folk music around his native environs and then wrote harmonies to them. Without Kreek, no Tormis, no Pärt, no Estonian Song Festival (the world's largest annual gathering of amateur choruses, or one of them...), no Singing Revolution (more on that in a few days...). Listen to Psalm 104, this could be written by Perotin. The harmonic drone underneath the melody sounds like they could be wind pipes from Homeric times. Or listen to Psalm 137. It has all the soul-stirring rise and fall of Russian Orthodox chant, but in seven parts rather than four. Or the deceptive simplicity of Psalm 22, only four parts, but all sorts of creepy chromaticism everywhere. Or the even more deceptive simplicity of the very brief Psalm 84: open fifths everywhere, open fifths and fourths everywhere. 

What can I say except for that this is amazing music? Kreek was a hugely prolific composer whose vast majority of work I have not explored, and I'm not even sure that there is a way. Go on Spotify and you see that there are only two CD's of his music. Estonia, which is clearly such a musical country whose government clearly provides robust support for its musicians, owes it to itself to provide Kreek a complete recorded edition. But one last work....

The Requiem of Cyrillus Kreek is unlike any other. While the text of the Requiem Mass is an Estonian translation of the Latin text (though for whatever reason the recording on youtube is sung in Latin...), many of the melodies are those of the traditional chant, which Kreek arranges in transformations that would have made the original Church Fathers' beards fall out. If you know the original Requiem chant, put it on and wait a few minutes. This is one of the great large-scale choral works ever written.