Skylark: Songbird
HMR

Skylark fans have cause to rejoice, with 2025 bringing with it not one but two releases from the renowned vocal ensemble. Only months ago, shades of blue, a full album of choral music by the Belgian-American composer Mark Van Overmeire, appeared, and now the multiple Grammy-nominated group celebrates its fifteenth anniversary with Songbird. At the centre of the forty-six-minute release is the world premiere recording of Benedict Sheehan's nine-part song cycle Songbird Antiphons, which both honours the splendour and diversity of bird species and laments the fact that, in the words of Skylark's Artistic Director Matthew Guard, “North America has lost almost 30% of its native songbird population since 1970 due to human activity,” an environmental tragedy of monumental proportions and an ominous harbinger of our planet's future.

Set to original poetry by Charles Anthony Silvestri and Talia Sheehan, Sheehan's work adopts micro and macro perspectives in focusing on the Chickadee, Carolina Wren, Red-winged Blackbird, Northern Cardinal, and White-throated Sparrow (Sheehan's texts) and birds in general (Silvestri's). By turns delightfully rousing and graceful, the thought-provoking work proves to be a wonderful showcase for the group in its interlacing of ensemble and solo parts. Striking too is the way Sheehan tailors his writing to suggest the particular calls of the different bird types, the effect applied especially vividly to “the white-throated sparrow.”

As resonant and important as Sheehan's piece is, it's but one of eight compositions presented on the release, and each is distinguished in its own way. From Caroline Shaw, we get and the swallow, a haunting setting of Psalm 84, and from Shawn Kirchner an arrangement of the bluegrass hymn “Angel Band.” Shaw weaves a magical spell with artful contrapuntal layering and amplification of the contrasts between the singers' timbres, and the soul-gospel tone of “Angel Band” makes for an uplifting close to the album. Pieces by Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams also appear, the French composer accounted for by "Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis” and the Englishman an arrangement of the traditional English folk ballad “The Turtle Dove.” Soprano Fotina Naumenko's elegant lead elevates Ravel's, while bass Sam Kreidenweis does the same for the Williams setting.

Guard singles out “Blagoslovi, dushe moya, Gospoda” ("Bless the Lord, O My Soul”) from Sergei Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil as a personal favourite (“This may be the Skylark live performance track that I have listened to the most times in my life,” he notes in the album booklet), and there's no denying the beauty of the rendition, especially when it's graced by a deeply moving solo by mezzo-soprano Luthien Brackett.

My own favourites, however, are the openers, James MacMillan's The Gallant Weaver and, in an arrangement by James Erb, “Shenandoah.” While any number of treatments of the MacMillan work are available on record and online, none holds a candle to Skylark's, which is sublime and almost overwhelming in its beauty. Elevated by a three-part soprano canon by Clare Brussel, Sarah Moyer, and Janet Stone, the performance is both transfixing and riveting, and you may well stop in your tracks when their voices soar into the upper register. That trio isn't the only thing that recommends the vocal tapestry either: the enrapturing backdrop the other singers generate to complement the leads is critical to the performance too. The timeless “Shenandoah” registers almost as strongly when Erb has a set of female voices deliver the first verse and a male group the second before the arrangement majestically expands to the full ensemble. The longing conveyed in this performance verges on heartbreaking, and a particularly lovely touch emerges when waves of voices lap hypnotically in a way that evokes the slow and timeless movements of the river itself—a brilliant and inspired gesture by Erb.

September 2025