What accounts for the appeal of Barber's Adagio for strings, or his own 1967 arrangement for voices as an Agnus Dei? Ten years ago, when I made a BBC Radio 3 documentary for the first anniversary of Barber's death, I asked some leading American musicians. William Schuman thought it was ''a perfect piece of music, emotionally precise''; Copland found it ''straight from the heart, sincere''; and Virgil Thomson naughtily declared it was ''a detailed love-scene, a bed scene—that's why conductors like to conduct it and audiences like to listen to it!''.
I hope that hasn't spoiled anybody's enjoyment of what has become virtually the American national funeral elegy. Its popularity even irked the composer, who snapped back at an interviewer to tell him to listen to something else! The vocal version in a performance like this, is in no way inferior. The Sixteen take it slowly with finely calculated sostenuto growth, but I trace a bit of distortion in the higher levels of the recording. The clean sound of this early music group brings out the Bach influence which, as in Villa Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras written around the same time, glamorizes the original. All the same, it works: this is a winning Agnus Dei.
The CD is well planned in the sense that it is designed to be heard in sequence. What a nice touch to put Steve Reich's Clapping music in (no singing) as a bridge to the choruses from The Lark, Bernstein's incidental music to Lilian Hellman's 1955 play based on Anouilh, where the first number contains clapping. Although this was a good period for Bernstein as composer, the choruses have no special coherence as a set but are valuable as a first recording. Copland's Four Motets, written when he was studying with Boulanger in 1921, show his early work at a less personal level than the early songs recorded for the first time by Roberta Alexander and Roger Vignoles (Etcetera (CD) KTC1100, 3/92).
But Irving Fine's The hour glass (1949), a cycle to seven poems of Ben Jonson, is quite a discovery from a neglected composer who died quite young. Barber's Reincarnation (to the Irish poet, James Stephens) seem slender after the Agnus Dei, and the catchy tune (titles music?) of David del Tredici's ''Acrostic song'' from Final Alice has periodic whisperings which come over rather like heavy breathing on the telephone. But the whole programme is delivered with polish and, following their Poulenc release, it augurs well if The Sixteen with their precise sound can be lured further into twentieth-century music.'