American Choral Music

The program of this Naxos release offers something less than the broad spectrum of American choral music the title might suggest. With the exception of William Bolcom's The Mask (1990), all the music on the album was composed between 1949 and 1960, and it's striking, although each composer had his own individual style, how many ideas were shared. The album's narrow focus emerges in the end as a virtue, however. The program sticks together, and it includes at least one lost gem, Irving Fine's The Hour-Glass (1949), to texts ... Read More

The program of this Naxos release offers something less than the broad spectrum of American choral music the title might suggest. With the exception of William Bolcom's The Mask (1990), all the music on the album was composed between 1949 and 1960, and it's striking, although each composer had his own individual style, how many ideas were shared. The album's narrow focus emerges in the end as a virtue, however. The program sticks together, and it includes at least one lost gem, Irving Fine's The Hour-Glass (1949), to texts by the English poet Ben Jonson. These six short a cappella settings are masterful in their handling of choral register, with solo voices weaving in and out of the choir in a tapestry of complex shadings, all the while keeping closely to the contours of Jonson's poetry and maintaining the intelligibility of the texts. The only thing that might not recommend this small work to college and university choirs is its considerable difficulty, but this poses no problem for the choristers of... Read Less