For some ensembles, the printed score of a composition is merely a stimulus to new creative activity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, and massive revision of a work in the process of remaking it for new forces has a long list of historical precedents. The Transcriptions disc by the French a cappella chamber chorus
Accentus features diverse treatments of music originally written for ensembles other than a chorus. Many are adapted from songs (of
Ravel,
Wolf,
Berg,
Mahler, and
Debussy) by transcriber
Clytus Gottwald, but others range farther afield; there are arrangements of two
Chopin piano pieces, a radical reworking of
Bach's aria Komm süsser Tod,
Samuel Barber's own fitting of the Agnus Dei text to his Adagio for Strings, and, most unusually of all, a texting of the Adagietto movement from
Mahler's Symphony No. 5 by
Gérard Pesson, with a pastiche of August von Platen stanzas about Vienna evoking the music's use in the famous 1971 film Death in Venice. The
Gottwald transcriptions apply techniques of
György Ligeti on top of the original music. The whole enterprise sounds outlandish, and the various liner notes confuse more than they illuminate, but this is nevertheless a gorgeous disc of a cappella music. Director
Laurence Equilbey (a woman) selected these pieces, whatever their diverse origins, with a view toward a unified effect; all are slow, chromatic, and gradually shifting in structure. The result has a certain stress-reducer quality that apparently appealed to U.S. Grammy nominators, but the disc is subtler and more variegated than
Joshua Bell's partially comparable Romance of the Violin. The singing offers lovely examples of French choral style. Soprano soloists occasionally split off to eerie effect, at one point breaking into a Mariah Carey-like high-pitched vocal whistle. On the whole, a novelty very well carried off.