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 ...
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 ...
Graham Johnson's Schubert edition covers all of Schubert's secular vocal compositions with piano accompaniment. However, this volume of the Schubert edition slips in a little Schubert pseudo-sacred music: a hymn to the Almighty, a hymn to the Unending, a pagan lamentation, a pantheistic hymn to the evening and another pantheistic hymn to the stars ...
There are many supremely beautiful volumes in Graham Johnson's Schubert edition -- Fassbaender's, Popp's, Ameling's, Hampson's, Bostridge's -- but this Goethe Schubertiad is as supremely beautiful as the best of them. Of course, Goethe always brought out the best in the passionate young composer and his Goethe songs are among the greatest of ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
Even though he was an admirer of Olivier Messiaen and a one-time colleague of Pierre Boulez, French composer Pierre Villette observed older traditions in his music, and wrote in a quasi-impressionistic language that incorporated both tonal harmonies and modal chants in a style reminiscent of Poulenc's or Duruflé's ecclesiastical works. Perhaps ...
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 ...
As smooth, rich, deep, and filling a recording of the repertoire as has ever been made, this disc of part songs by Gustav Holst should appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Of course, how wide the audience for early twentieth century English part songs written by a composer known for having written The Planets is anybody's guess. That Holst ...
With songs like Der Einsame (D. 800), Der Wanderer an den Mond D. 870, the three Shakespeare settings (D. 888, 889, and 891), and the four Mignon Lieder (D. 877), this volume of Graham Johnson's Schubert cannot miss. And it doesn't: with baritone Richard Jackson's lonely but cheerful Der Einsame and Der Wanderer an den Mond, tenor John Mark ...
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