This disc was a bestseller straight out of the box, one of a precious few collections of new music by a contemporary composer of which that might be said. Eric Whitacre is a fifth-generation Nevadan who couldn't read music when he enrolled at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. On his first day in the choir, which he joined because of some ...
British chamber choir Polyphony has recorded a collection of music by Morten Lauridsen that includes not only his gorgeous but ubiquitous cycle Les chansons des roses, but two less familiar cycles, Mid-Winter Songs, and Nocturnes, and several shorter pieces. The sound of the choir is full, rich, and well blended, and the singers perform with ...
While it's possible to admire Bruckner's sacred music without grasping the composer's Austrian Roman Catholic faith, it's not right and it's not fair. Because while one can admire the composer's mastery of harmony and counterpoint and his genius for form and modulation, the meaning of the religious texts he sets determined not merely the music's ...
Despite the wide geographical separation between the music's point of origin and that of the performers -- Morten Lauridsen is based in southern California, while Polyphony and its conductor Stephen Layton are as English as they come, with a profound knowledge of the acoustic qualities of London's churches -- this disc represents an ideal match of ...
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 ...
The pairing of the Australian-British-American Percy Grainger, whose brief works drew heavily on the folk songs of those countries, with the hefty late Romanticism of Norway's Edvard Grieg, seems odd at first. But the two met and spent considerable time together in the months before Grieg's death in 1907, and Grainger later championed the Four ...
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. ...
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 ...
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. ...
O Magnum Mysterium focuses on a Christmas repertoire that is remarkably unified in the context of the stylistically eclectic twentieth century: it offers a cappella English (and English-language) carols dating from the end of World War I until around 1970. Music by four composers -- Herbert Howells, Richard Rodney Bennett, Kenneth Leighton, and ...
This recording of Tavener works dating from between 1996 and 2003 was sure to attract attention in any case; Tavener is one of the major choral composers of our time, and the works included show evidence of a significant new direction in his style. And the composer's de-conversion from the Eastern Orthodox Church seems likely to win it even more ...
New York Polyphony, a male quartet, in many senses calls to mind Anonymous 4, the women's ensemble that made an extraordinary career focusing on early music, but also branching out as far afield as folk song and contemporary repertoire. The collection here is primarily devoted to Medieval and Renaissance pieces, but includes works by modern ...
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