French chamber choir Accentus and its chic director, Laurence Equilbey, enjoyed international success with their two mostly a cappella Transcriptions albums from 2001 and 2006. Now these albums have been repackaged as a deluxe, double-CD/hardback-book set in Naïve’s 10th-anniversary series. The discs feature beautiful singing of such familiar items as Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei (his vocal version of the Adagio for Strings). Yet much of the magic lies in the way Accentus and various arrangers reorient our ears to music we only thought we knew — such as with Prokofiev’s orchestral song “The Field of Death” (from Alexander Nevsky), the choral treatment truly haunting the mind like a picture of collective grief.

The Accentus makeover of Debussy’s piano prelude Des Pas sur la Neige (Footprints in the Snow) is less transcription than transformation, a conjuring trick. The new weave, to verses by Rilke and Mallarmé, allows dissonances to rise out of the texture like spirits, the voices creating resonances that Debussy could only dream of on the keyboard. The Debussy was remade by German composer–conductor Clytus Gottwald. On the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, he led the recording of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna — a milestone work for the “orchestrating” of voices. Gottwald’s arrangement of Ravel’s song “Soupir” here comes closest to Ligeti’s hovering otherworldliness.

But unlike much postwar avant-garde choral music, the arrangers here generally avoid non-singing vocalization for color — so it’s striking when a whistled descant threads silver through the shimmer of the Pavane from Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye. In the ensemble re-creations of Lieder by Schubert, Wagner, Wolf, Mahler and Berg — which sound both foreign and familiar — just the rising cry of a solo voice can feel like a special effect. Always fine-tuned, the Accentus vocal blend is simultaneously lithe and voluptuous, Equilbey conducting the rhythm as if singing were ballet.

With backing from a few strings and lute, “Winter” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons sounds like a chorus from an opera. The Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is another wordless work to which Accentus gives surprising voice. Arranger Gérard Pesson tied the Adagietto to its use in Visconti’s film of Death in Venice, drawing on Venetian verses by the man who inspired Thomas Mann’s tale. Hearing this music sung takes getting used to, but Pesson points out in the extensive booklet notes that a choir is just another kind of string orchestra — the singers’ vocal cords being the strings.

-- Bradley Bambarger, Listen [March 2009]