Dan Locklair is professor of music and composer in residence at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. A long-standing household name among choral musicians, he has numerous accolades, including a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, an Aliénor Award, and two North Carolina Composer Fellowship Awards. Perhaps most significant to readers of TAO, Locklair was the AGO’s 1996 Composer
of the Year, a distinction bestowed upon him during the Guild’s centenary. The composer’s lauded career has resulted in an extensive oeuvre—one that has been preserved on numerous albums from a plethora of record labels.

Locklair’s newest disc is a collection of shorter choral works. The lengthiest of them—the Brief Mass and the Three Christmas Motets—however, are not the source of the album’s title track. That distinction goes to “From East to West,” a Christmas anthem heard on the CD’s opening track. Scored for SATB chorus, brass quintet, and organ, this short work sets an English translation of a four-stanza hymn by the fifth-century Christian poet Coelius Sedulius. In the liner notes, the composer outlines his compositional process:
“From East to West opens with an organ introduction that presents a harmonic backdrop for the entire anthem as it alternates between D and A-flat-major tonalities. These tonalities are a tritone apart (the furthermost, foreign relationship in traditional tonality) and seek to symbolize the expanse of ‘East to West’ and ‘shore to shore’ that Christ’s birth and life sought to bridge.”

The brass and organ accompaniment for “From East to West” (performed by Onyx Brass and organist David Goode) yield a fittingly triumphant opening number for the album. This orchestration is repeated—with the addition of timpani—on the final track, “The Texture of Creation.” These two works, however, ultimately serve as small-scale bookends for the more intimate a cappella and organ-accompanied choral pieces that make up the core of the album’s hour-plus-long program—music that, as a listener, I found more revealing of the composer’s originality. To list only one of the many moving passages one can hear on From East to West, the haunting opening bars of the motet Dona nobis pacem are well sung by the Choir of Royal Holloway, the premier undergraduate choir at Royal Holloway, University of London, conducted by Rupert Gough.

The centerpiece of the album is Locklair’s Brief Mass, written in 1993 and scored for a cappella double chorus. At almost 18 minutes in length, it is also the disc’s most substantial work. The Gloria and Sanctus, scored for separate SATB choirs, are perhaps the most interesting movements of the Mass, which unfolds in unpredictable ways, with recitative-like passages for soloists (in the Gloria) and Phrygian-inflected harmonic shifts.

The performances on this CD are not without minor flaws. The absence of a professional choral ensemble can be heard in louder dynamics, where excessive vibrato occasionally obfuscates Locklair’s tightly voiced harmonies. (Softer passages, however, are stunning.) The Onyx Brass and, especially, David Goode are consummate professionals of the highest caliber.

At the end of the day, however, the true highlight of this album is Locklair himself. From East to West offers a generous sampling of some of the composer’s best shorter choral works, performed by excellent musicians who have meticulously prepared them. This CD is highly recommended.