Skylark: shades of blue: Choral Music of Mark Van Overmeire
Kramúsica Records

Skylark's latest recording venture, a full album of material by the Belgian-American composer Mark Van Overmeire, carries with it some degree of risk, especially when its last release, Clear Voices In The Dark, received two Grammy nominations (‘Best Choral Performance' and ‘Best Engineered Classical Album') and was recognized as an exceptional artistic achievement. The vocal ensemble's Artistic Director Matthew Guard had to have asked himself before committing to the Van Overmeire project whether the composer's material would be strong enough to satisfy as a follow-up. Clearly Guard answered in the affirmative as shades of blue comprises two choral suites by the composer; that the renderings of Hereafter am I and Between the shadows are world premiere recordings enhances the release's value all the more.

shades of blue isn't the first album to feature the music of Van Overmeire, who was born in Sint-Amandsberg on April 2, 1968 and studied at the Municipal Conservatory of Bruges and the Royal Conservatory of Ghent. Three earlier albums on his Kramúsica Records imprint include collaborations with the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra (Angkor, 2011) and renowned guitarist Irina Kulikova (La Forét ~ Drie Rivieren, 2021). The seed for the new release was planted when Van Overmeire approached Guard about the possibility of a collaboration.

His music clearly struck a major chord with Guard and his Boston-based ensemble, and one listen to the works shows why they decided to commit themselves to a full-album treatment of Van Overmeire material. Both multi-movement settings are abundant in resplendent melodies tailor-made for Skylark's artistry, and the ensemble's lustrous textures amplify the surface beauty of the composer's music whilst also revealing its depths. Hereafter am I and Between the shadows are pieces with which the listener connects immediately, but the two insinuate themselves even more with repeated exposure. Van Overmeire's music is, in a word, insidious.

One of the upsides of recording material by a living composer is that it offers the possibility of collaboration and the interpreter receiving invaluable guidance from the work's creator. At their best, such partnerships benefit each participant in different ways, the composer in having his work illuminated by performers deeply sympathetic to his vision and the interpreters benefiting from being gifted superior material to perform. For this project, Van Overmeire came from Nevada to join Skylark's sixteen sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses and producer John Cox at Corpus Christi Parish in Sandwich, Massachusetts to record the forty-one-minute album during January 2025.

The opening three-part work, Hereafter am I, explores issues of generational influence and the ways by which we reckon with the legacies we inherit and continue the cycle into the future. There are melodic hooks (earworms, if you prefer) aplenty, and it's very possible haunting lines such as “It's my life, it's my life / Do you know how I feel?” (from the first work's “Torch of the past”) and “So, don't stop / Go on” (from the second's “When all is said and done”) will resonate long after the album's over. In the work's opening movement, voices collect into immaculate unison and polyphonic groupings, their utterances in one passage percussive and lyrical in another. Declamatory gestures in the first part contrast with gentler ones in the subsequent “Beyond the gaze,” though numerous changes occur within a given movement to resist single-dimensional labeling. The entrancing poetic effect of the music in the second movement carries into the equally potent third, “From this day on,” when vocal lines entwine in particularly riveting manner.

Advancing through five parts, Between the shadows considers the ways we contend with and overcome crippling doubt and move beyond vulnerability and fear towards purpose and self-fulfillment. Soaring sopranos induce enchantment during the opening part, “When all is said and done,” but it's the full tapestry woven by the ensemble's voices that makes the music so intoxicating. The ear's immediately arrested by the rising “No way out” figure that initiates the second movement, “I come to you,” and is transfixed all over again by a sublime choral episode that eventually emerges. “In your dreams” casts a prolonged spell when the music unfurls in a meditative, almost chant-like form before swelling briefly into a wordless dynamo. At album's end, the sound of soprano Clare Brussel's voice gliding across the others' shimmering foundation during “Hiding between the shadows” makes for a beautiful way to end the set.

July 2025