Kati Agócs: The Debrecen Passion
Kati Agócs: The Debrecen Passion
Lorelei Ensemble with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project
"A spiraling work for 12 female voices and chamber orchestra. A glimpse of any given moment exposes waves of Krzysztof Penderecki-like vocal clusters, pulsing chant, flurries of Baroque trumpet and sumptuous Late-Romantic orchestration....It's an overwhelming plate of emotion and color...The music's subject matter is, after all, the Passion of Christ. Agócs filters and rearranges the story through lenses of Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély, Kabbalistic prayer and ancient Latin, Hungarian and Georgian religious texts. But it's more than a sum of disparate influences. The Debrecen Passion is high-craft, high-drama music that, in certain ways, goes down like an old-school Hollywood score cut to fit the fast, ADD-inspired edits of modern television: think chase-scene drums against big-band orchestral statements, intensely unsettling a cappella drops and religious fervor at its most intense, all within a few bars... or at the same time."
- WQXR NEW YORK, Q2 ALBUM OF THE WEEK
“Agócs pays tribute to her Hungarian heritage in the disc’s titular score, The Debrecen Passion. As she melds the 12 female voices of the remarkable Lorelei Ensemble with glowing orchestral sonorities, Agócs also suspends vocal lines on Latin and Jewish texts. The 23-minute work is an iridescent wonder.”
TRACK LIST
THE DEBRECEN PASSION (2015) Lorelei Ensemble
REQUIEM FRAGMENTS (2008)
BY THE STREAMS OF BABYLON (2008) Kati Agócs, soprano Lisa Bielawa, soprano
...LIKE TREASURE HIDDEN IN A FIELD (2010) chorale—peregrination—pearl of great price— tolling bells (broad attacks)—cut from an infinite fabric
VESSEL (2011) Margot Rood, soprano Sonja Tengblad, soprano Katherine Growdon, mezzo-soprano
“A mystical confluence of the sacred and secular illuminated by the superb Lorelei Ensemble and BMOP.”