Silent Voices: If You Listen, National Sawdust, 2018
Silent Voices
Released November 1, 2018
New Amsterdam Records
The album features a selection of works from the Chorus’s ongoing multimedia, multi-composer concert series of the same name, installments of which have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (May 2017), National Sawdust (April 2018) and PROTOTYPE Festival (Jan 2017). On the album, pieces from Jeff Beal (“House of Cards”), Ellis Ludwig-Leone (San Fermin), Mary Kouyoumdjian, Paul Miller/DJ Spooky, Nico Muhly, Shara Nova, Toshi Reagon, Kamala Sankaram, Caroline Shaw are performed by Brooklyn Youth Chorus and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).
Reviews
I Care If You Listen
On both the album and in concert, Grizzly Bear is accompanied by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, a choir that lifts the singing into the ether -- up there in the brooding clouds, dodging lightning bolts and cringing amid the thunderclaps. Silent Voices not only gives voice to those who have been historically marginalized, but also gives the members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus agency over their message and their music making, allowing them to act as catalysts for change. The young choristers not only demonstrate a mature comprehension of the subject matter, but also exhibit an impressive command of vocal styles ranging from hip hop to gospel to contemporary techniques to bel canto singing.
Textura
Don’t mistake Brooklyn Youth Chorus for a grade-school choir belting out gleeful tunes for the school assembly. Though the group’s singers range in age from twelve to eighteen, they’re a preternaturally mature bunch unafraid of tackling topically relevant issues and injustice in all its forms. A natural tension emerges in the contrast between the youthful sonorities of their voices and the dramatic political content presented in the group’s sophomore album, but if anything that contrast accentuates how central such issues already are for a generation on the cusp of adulthood. It’s not hard to understand how the singers come to be so enlightened: members of the Grammy Award-winning outfit (for its involvement in the premiere recording of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls) are drawn from five boroughs and thus represent a socio-economically diverse portrait of NYC youth.