The New York Virtuoso Singers, under the direction of Harold Rosenbaum, expose listeners to auditory treasures with their recording, Thea Musgrave Choral Works. Content and context for this album seem to synchronize well with one another. Both Rosenbaum's ensemble of sixteen professional vocalists and the Bridge recording label specialize in contemporary music. The recording is an appropriate tribute to Musgrave on the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday, given that she has held a career-long interest in choral music from Four Madrigals (1953) to Ithaca (2010). Malcolm MacDonald has written thorough liner notes that explore Musgrave's musical heritage and share his insights into the nineteen tracks on this CD. The six selections chosen for this recording provide a helpful primer of Musgrave's vocal music, spanning over thirty years of her compositional output.

Thea Musgrave strives to develop the dramatic potential in music. The variety of styles and compositional techniques she uses is no doubt related to her extraordinary training. Born near Edinburgh, Scotland in 1928, she began her studies at a local university and continued at the Conservatoire in Paris as a pupil of Nadia Boulanger. Musgrave also studied with Aaron Copland as a Tanglewood Fellow in the late 1950s. This visit to the United States would not be her last. In 1970, she was a visiting professor of music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she married another faculty member, Peter Mark, one year later. Musgrave has resided in the U.S. since 1972. Following her work with Copland, she experimented briefly with serialism before moving closer to, but still toying with, traditional tonality. Musgrave frequently employs melodic dissonance, chromaticism, and avoidance of traditional cadential motion in the choral works on this album. Unifying each of the pieces, however, is her firm commitment to dramatic illustration of text and subject matter.

The choral works collected on this recording demonstrate Musgrave's keen sense of creative expression and her deft ability to effectively bring text to life. Opening the album is Musgrave's extended work for unaccompanied voices, For the Time Being: Advent (1986). Commissioned by the BBC, the text comes from W. H. Auden's poem describing personal loss and self-questioning during World War II. Musgrave creates a sense of dark intensity as voices undulate with ascending and descending minor seconds. Moving forward, the dramatic text is easily understood as the composer brings it to the forefront against stacked harmonies and repeated passages of text in the background. British stage and screen actor Michael York narrates a central spoken section, which brings the piece to a dramatic climax. Whereas the chorus offers a mix of consolation and chaos, the narrator's text decries humanity's loss of child-like innocence from the death and destruction associated with war. After more than 25 minutes, the work comes to a peaceful, albeit brief repose using major tonality before quickly dispersing to stacked chords on the text “somewhere” that seem to question any sense of resolution.

In stark contrast to the first selection, Black Tambourine is a more musically accessible collection of six songs for women's voices, piano, and various percussion instruments, which are to be played by chorus members. Composed in 1986, the same year as the album's opening track, this work is characterized by clearly defined melodic material and consonant harmonies. Hart Crane's poetry is masterfully illustrated in these shorter songs, perhaps most effectively in “My Grandmother's Love Letters.” Musgrave opens the song with a fractured quotation of Mozart's Piano Sonata, K. 545 in a nostalgic effort to reflect the fragmented memory of the grandmother. The singers gently guide the matriarch through brief flashes of disconnected images in a consonant choral setting.

The part-song “John Cook,” written in 1963, is the earliest piece on this recording and the shortest at just over one minute. Musgrave cleverly integrates a rhythmic ostinato throughout the song that seems to draw the listener back to childhood days on a playground. Each time the text “He, haw, hum” is heard, Musgrave tinkers with it by transposing it and passing it among the voice parts, almost as if she were playing a game to further highlight the nursery rhyme aspect of this charming little song.

Musgrave composed the final three works on the album using poetry from Poems on the Underground: an innovative public arts program, currently celebrating 25 years of success. Each year, a series of historical and contemporary poems are showcased inside trains on the London Underground. Musgrave's settings of selected poems for these three collections could be considered modern-day madrigals. On the Underground, Set #1: On gratitude, love and madness was completed in 1994 for unaccompanied SATB chorus with divisi. The first and last pieces are expressions of gratitude brought to life through her use of lush chordal writing. Of particular note from this set is Musgrave's treatment of Emily Dickinson's text, “Much Madness is divinest Sense.” The majority of the text is given to male voices while the female voices simulate madness with chromatically meandering melismatic passages. The second set of pieces is subtitled The Strange & the Exotic. Also completed in 1994, this set is more readily accessible, due in part to the absence of divisi among SATB voice parts. The opening and closing songs are essentially identical depictions of a dream world. Musgrave cleverly activates the text of “I Saw a Peacock With a Fiery Tail” using musical devices to create a sense of onomatopoeia. Musgrave uses rapid text declamation in the third song, “The Subway Piranhas,” to heighten anxiety among listeners over this urban myth. The final set from this series is an extended madrigal that explores what life might have been like during “A Medieval Summer.” Completed in 1995, this piece calls for SATB divisi chorus and SAT soloists. Musgrave explores spatial relationships among the vocalists by providing score instructions as to placement in the performance venue and directors for on and offstage movement. This compositional technique heightens the dramatic underlay of the text as multiple quotations from Sumer is icumen in are heard from a variety of positions on this well-engineered recording.

The quality of Musgrave's music is enhanced by the vocal brilliance of Rosenbaum's New York Virtuoso Singers. Recorded at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, the diction is remarkably clear, especially considering the variety of textures present in Musgrave's compositions. In addition, the intonation of the vocalists is focused, allowing the listener to enjoy the aural challenges of Musgrave's stacked harmonies and melodic dissonances. The album is a nice compilation of her choral music, from the somber setting of Auden's epic poem to the whimsical nature of an all-too-brief part-song. Musgrave described her music in a recent text:

Musical drama is present in all of these selections. Musgrave even finds ways to bring this element out in her shorter pieces. Illustrations of dark sobriety and frivolous humor are brought to life thanks to Musgrave's creativity and masterful ability to paint text in well-crafted compositions.