This album seems to be the product of at least two artistic agendas. On the one hand, we have a series of King’s Singers commissions from Johannesburg and the Western Cape, culminating in the Zulu chants of Stanley Glasser’s Lalela Zulu (literally “Listen to things Zulu”). On the other hand, a commissioned work, Street Songs, that is the combined effort of three BMG artists, the King’s Singers being joined here by Evelyn Glennie and BMG Catalyst’s ‘exclusive’ composer, Steve Martland. That the CD makes musical sense at all seems to be down to the astute compilation of the producer, Ulrich Schneider, but this has to come at the cost of splitting up the Martland pieces and spreading them throughout the disc. Not that Street Songs would have necessarily sounded better together as a set. Even its basic idea – making new settings of the original texts to some famous English children’s tunes – feels uncomfortably close to the English nursery rhymes of Ligeti’s recent work for the King’s Singers (available in Sony’s Ligeti Edition, 1/97).
As someone who really admires Steve Martland’s recent work, I find it exasperating that his music continues to be so uneven. The first song on the disc, “Poor Roger”, is written in the spirit of Martland’s tremendous Contemporary Music Network tour last year and is an absolute winner. But I must confess that I am as baffled as the performers seem to be by “Green Gravel”, whose strongest idea comes only at its final cadence; and by the slowest of the set, “Poor Jenny”, which aims at grandeur but ends up sounding quietly numb. “Oranges and Lemons” is typical of Martland’s hit-and-miss approach. The idea of getting the King’s Singers to imitate distant street singers could work – but not if the tessitura of their calls is set so high that they sound uncomfortable and unidiomatically out of tune.
The heart of this album, which has to contend not only with Street Songs but with some solo percussion works performed by Evelyn Glennie, is surely the choral works by Peter Klatzow, Peter Louis Van Dijk and Stanley Glasser, which all explore aspects of South African culture. Klatzow is more successful than Martland in writing idiomatically for the marimba and balancing it with the voices of the King’s Singers. The hushed quality of Peter Louis Van Dijk’s Horizons contrasts well with Stanley Glasser’s entertaining Lalela Zulu, which is more upfront and has a more direct relationship to its sources. All three pieces are brilliantly performed here by the King’s Singers. It is just a shame that RCA have chosen to regale the booklet with colour pictures of the group promenading with Evelyn Glennie, instead of supplying us with the song texts that would have helped us appreciate these works more fully.'