This is a more intimate version of John Rutter's Requiem, which uses smaller ensembles, enhancing the sense of reassurance that the music and the text offer. Rutter's music is almost always warmly tonal, built with a simplicity in its textures that descends from the tradition of Vaughan Williams. Here, frequently only one or two instruments are ...
Widely admired for his operas and symphonic works, and internationally acclaimed for his numerous film scores, Richard Rodney Bennett has received far less appreciation for his choral music, even though this body of work is quite substantial, highly accessible, and rewarding. These 2004 performances by John Rutter and the splendid Cambridge ...
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is that rarest of rare things: a genuine world-premiere recording of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach appropriately entitled Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' (All with Got and Nothing Without). A single-movement cantata setting of a birthday ode for Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar composed in 1713, the work ...
This recording grew out of the Monteverdi Choir's actual pilgrimage from southwest France to Santiago de Compostela in 2004, during which it performed the music in the churches where pilgrims making the journey would have heard it. The acoustics of the recording convincingly convey the variety of settings in which the music would have been heard; ...
Listeners looking for examples of Arvo Pärt's tonal, tintinnabular style will find that most of the works on this 2003 CD meet their needs. Composed between 1996 and 2002, these eight pieces are triadically based, shaded with modal inflections, and free of the tight dissonances and chromatic touches that adorned much of Pärt's music in the 1980s. ...
In this compilation of music from previously released Christmas albums, John Rutter writes that his intent is to create a collection that reflects the variety of the Christmas season -- the religious and the secular, the contemplative and the festive -- and is fully successful in gathering selections that are diverse, but fit well together. The ...
Inspired by his Catholic faith, James MacMillan often composes intense works on religious themes. Yet unlike his older contemporaries, Sir John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, whose calm meditations and ecstatic paeans reflect their composers' certitude in Christian redemption, MacMillan frequently considers darker subjects and creates a dramatic tension ...
Ikon by Harry Christophers and the Sixteen is a marvelous offering of sacred choral gems, the group's second collection on Decca following the successful 2005 release Renaissance: Music for Inner Peace. A perfect disc to introduce this well-established vocal ensemble to newcomers, Ikon consists of 16 works that are evenly matched in their sublime ...
This box set is a compilation of compilations, an assembly of Rutter anthology discs featuring performances going back as far as 1983. Each CD is marked "This album is part of a box set. Not to be sold separately." But at least some of them appear to simply reproduce the booklet text and artwork of the original releases. The upside is that nothing ...
The Cambridge Singers, founded and conducted by John Rutter, is joined here by the Farnham Youth Choir and the Royal Philharmonic in a collection of Christmas music that includes an assortment of traditional and newly written carols, folk songs, and orchestral holiday pieces. The CD would be of interest to anyone looking for an album of upbeat ...
Both in the program and in the forces involved, this disc presents unexpected combinations. The virtuoso British choir the Sixteen and conductor Harry Christophers have specialized in clean, accessible recordings of works from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. And the pairing of Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de Confessore, K. 339, with the Fauré ...
The Sixteen have had phenomenal success with their precise yet agreeable choral singing, especially in their native Britain; this release carries a strip billing the group as "the voices of Classic FM," the crossover network that has, depending on whom you ask, either saved classical music in Britain or destroyed it. Of course the truth is ...
John Tavener's Requiem, given its premiere in 2008 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, is not one of the composer's more coherent works. It draws its text not only from the traditional Latin requiem, but from Hindu, Muslim, and Christian scriptures and writings, a diversity that's not uncommon in contemporary religious works, ...
Admirers of Harry Christophers and his exemplary choral ensemble The Sixteen will no doubt have the highest expectations for this 2008 Coro release of George Frederick Handel's Messiah, especially because the group is almost ideal in size, sonority, and technical mastery to render this work in the best period performance style. Even the most ...
William Alwyn (1905-1985) was an inspired and accomplished English composer of unquestioned skill and professionalism, but his music, while immediately attractive, never quite rises to the level that would put him in the first rank of composers. His harmonic language is reminiscent of Vaughan Williams, but his melodies don't have the folk-like ...
British choir the Sixteen is billed as being among "the Voices of Classic FM," the impressively successful British independent classical radio network. This mixed-gender adult group of (natch) 16 voices performs music ranging from the early English Renaissance to Mozart and, on occasion, the Romantics. An objection to their style might be that ...
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