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Review: Strenuous beauty, worthy effortGrammy's best choral performance nominationsBy Porter Anderson  William Bolcom's huge William Blake cycle of songs is one of 15 Grammy nominations the label Naxos has at stake on Wednesday. RELATED
GRAMMY NOMINEES Nominees for 2006 Best Choral Performance Grammy The 48th annual Grammy Awards show airs live at 8 p.m. ET on February 8. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- "If the doors of perception were cleansed," wrote the English poet, painter and mystic William Blake, "everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." And two of the nominated works in the Grammys' best choral performance category -- one of them a setting of Blake's visionary writings -- give voice to that concept. In some ways, American composer William Bolcom is a cultural descendent of the great Austrian-American atonalist Arnold Schoenberg. Bolcom has the advantage of time, of course. Modernity has encouraged harmonic experimentation. But Bolcom writes of working on his setting of Blake from the age of 17, and having parts of it written as early as 1956, five years after Schoenberg's death. Schoenberg, for his part, may stand as one of the most surprising rediscoveries of the period for students of those music-appreciation courses that have to pigeon-hole each major figure for time's sake. The man who broke free of Western music's traditional structure with a famous 12-tone approach might have been trotted past you as one of those Continental malcontents. You know, the type who tried to foist off dissonance as pretty. Not only were a lot of those malcontents right, of course, but they weren't always trying to make your teeth tingle or your eyes cross. In fact, if you've heard Schoenberg's ravishing "Verklarte Nacht" ("Transfigured Night"), you won't be surprised at the shimmering grace heard at times on the new Schoenberg CD from France's amazing ensemble Accentus. Surprise, though, is the alpha and omega of Bolcom's Blake tribute, a massive "musical illumination," as Bolcom calls it. Inside 'outsider'Bolcom, the Seattle-born pianist and composer, spent more than a quarter of a century on his huge song cycle, "Songs of Innocence and of Experience: A Musical Illumination of the Poems of William Blake." Often "Revelation"-like, Blake's poems appeared in 1783 ("Songs of Innocence") and 1789 ("Songs of Experience"). Alternately serving as advice for inspirited living and sheer rhapsodies of religious fervor, these verses have all the abandon and strong line of thought you find in Blake's paintings of heroic titans in cosmos-spanning poses. From the "Innocence" introduction's sweet "Piping down the valleys wild" to the gathering joy of "The Tyger" in the first section of "Songs of Experience," Leonard Slatkin's direction of the University of Michigan's symphony, School of Music soloists and choirs, and the University Musical Society is forceful and firm. Overall, the delivery is crisp, bright and blessed particularly by the acrobatic solo work of soprano Christine Brewer and Bolcom's wife, mezzo Joan Morris. Tenor Thomas Young has some gamy moments, too, as what may at times seem the voice of Blake, himself. There are stunning acoustic effects managed by these forces, and some piercing evocations of the 18th-century world in which Blake could have envisioned receiving instruction from cloud-borne celestial figures. Where Bolcom's long sojourn through the valley of the shadow of these lowering writings may have overtaken his compositional balance is in such passages as "The Little Vagabond" -- suddenly a Wild West-toned music-hall affair for a whining fiddles and belching bass. So fond of Blake's concept of the "contrary" is Bolcom that he may have at times looked too hard for contrarian impulses in his creativity. He might better have been served by coordinated strands of the mirror-like effect Blake sought in his writings ("The Little Girl Found," "A Little Girl Lost"). In the end, we miss the unity of the composer's voice that we know and love in the poet-Blake's words and the painter-Blake's muscular color. These images and moments -- some as fleeting as Messiaen's visions, others as colloquial as Grofe's donkeys -- are contrary, alright. And maybe to keep an audience in its seats for as long as this work takes to perform, you want lots of contrast. But it's Bolcom's craftsmanship you'll finally honor here, in lieu of consistency. Without question, this is a major achievement, a life's key work brought to jangling fruition in Ann Arbor's Hill Auditorium. It's just the creaking of innovation you hear in a few too many chords, the formidable composer trying so very hard to clothe his beloved Blake -- who knew that his own figures strode best when naked. It's "the mind-forg'd manacles I hear," as Blake wrote -- the self-conscious work of Bolcom's desire to pay tribute to the poet. But Bolcom is a good, good blacksmith. He, Blake and their listeners could do worse. Accentus at work The cover photo on Accentus' Schoenberg CD, from Naive, is by Magnum photographer Nikos Economopoulos. So finely tuned is founder Laurence Equilbey's ensemble Accentus that these 32 singers place before you something surely close to what Schoenberg himself described as "an illusion for mixed chorus." A poignant note written by Schoenberg in 1923 explains that at the time he was composing his "Friede auf Erden" ("Peace on Earth"), he "thought such pure harmony between men was conceivable. Since then I have had to learn to make concessions." Accentus makes none. Their reading of these difficult, reaching, entwined harmonies and sense-sharpening vocal reaches are deliberate, driven: "Oh, how many bloody deeds / Have been perpetrated by Discord," as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's text has it. As a collective, they clearly are as committed to their group voice as the Polyphony singers are in the rival Grammy-nominated CD "Lux aeterna" by Morten Lauridsen. (Read the review) And it's meant as no slap to the excellent instrumental Ensemble Intercontemporain (formed by Pierre Boulez in 1976) to say that Accentus is at its most formidable when singing a cappella. For a quick, thrilling sonic snapshot of this choir's power, jump right to the final cut on the CD, the "De profundis," a setting of Psalm 130. "Out of the deep have I called unto thee," the altos lead the group into a sung and chanted "Lord, hear my voice" picked up by the men. The work, only five minutes long, builds to a freezing, lonely plea, "O Israel, trust in the Lord." The sopranos sustain ear-popping arcs of white-fire sound while the men chant beneath them, earthbound in plodding, dependable faith: "With him is plenteous redemption." For sheer technical choral artistry, the battle of this Grammy category is between Stephen Layton and Polyphony and Equilbuy and her acute Accentus. 
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