Christopher Tyler Nickel - Mass; Te Deum
Catherine Redding; Vancouver Chamber Choir; Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra; Clyde Mitchell
Avie Records AV2748 (avie-records.com/releases/christopher-tyler-nickel-mass-•-te-deum)
“Beauty-filled music” – that’s what I called Christopher Tyler Nickel’s Requiem (The WholeNote, Summer 2024), praising Nickel’s “distinctive melodic gift” that consolidated influences from Gregorian Chant to Bruckner, Fauré and Carl Orff. Along with his many scores for film, theatre and TV, the B.C.-based Nickel continues his commitment to sacred texts with Mass and Te Deum, composed concurrently between 2019 and 2024. Around 26 minutes each, they’re modest in scale compared to the 70-minute Requiem and minuscule measured against his seven-hour setting of The Gospel According to Mark.
“I’m always finding the melancholy in things,” writes Nickel. Here, his unusual scoring combines, in addition to strings, the plaintiveness of oboe, English horn, oboe d’amore and bass oboe with the sepulchral sonorities of four horns and tuba in Te Deum, two Wagner tubas replacing two of the horns in Mass. The pervading disquiet is heightened by continually shifting, irregular meters, including measures of five, seven and ten beats.
Nickel supplants Requiem’s stylistic eclecticism with a hyper-emotional, near-cinematic spin on Renaissance modes and harmonies. Mass begins with a plea of desperation in Kyrie, followed by a joyous Gloria, but solemnity reigns throughout the remaining sections. Te Deum is even darker. Canadian soprano, Catherine Redding, soloist in the Requiem recording, adds fervent entreaties to Te Deum’s intense anguish. Clyde Mitchell, conductor of the Requiem CD, draws urgent drama from Vancouver’s Chamber Choir and Contemporary Orchestra in these latest examples of Nickel’s truly “beauty-filled music.”
