This gorgeous release by the young English unaccompanied vocal group Stile Antico would be worth your time and money simply for the quiet, perfectly intoned singing on display here. But the album accomplishes more than vocal virtuosity. Stile Antico presents music by three generations of English choral composers, all of it from the Catholic sphere ...
This disc is supposed to hurt. Just look at the program: it starts with Crumb's Black Angels for electric string quartet, a work that is the aural equivalent of Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and ends with Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, a work that is either the aural equivalent of a monument to the victims of war and fascism written in the ruins ...
Thomas Tallis was a composer who inclined toward musical extremes -- or sometimes was pushed toward them. The opening title track of this CD, Spem in alium, is a 40-voice motet for eight five-voice choirs. There's nothing like it in the Renaissance repertory except for an Italian piece to which it was written in answer, as a response to a ...
When you see a title like The Tallis Scholars Sing Thomas Tallis, you know the music's going to be right, sort of like when you hear Aretha Franklin sing in Detroit, or hear an oversize band of Central Europeans play Mahler. And so it is. This disc compiles Tallis Scholars recordings from 1985, 1986, 1992, and 1998 for the purpose of, per the ...
Robert Shaw is dead, but his recorded legacy lives on -- that is, if you can call recordings living. Telarc -- the label which served Shaw so faithfully in life by recording the greatest American choral conductor who ever lived in the core choral repertoire in exemplary sound -- Telarc is releasing every little scrap of music that the grand old ...
Lighten Our Darkness: Music for the Close of Day is the first disc seen in a long, long time from British label Collegium Records and its sole talents, John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers. This one is a radical departure from just about everything the choir has done for Collegium in the past, particularly as it does not include a single John ...
While this is not the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus' first disc since new music director Norman Mackenzie took up his post -- recordings of Berlioz's Requiem and Vaughan Williams' "A Sea Symphony" preceded it -- it is their first acapella disc under his direction. It is in every way a lovely disc but it is in no way an outstanding disc. With ...
"Why present just Handel's Coronation Anthems for King George II when you can present the whole Coronation?" seems to be the proposition that underlies this two-disc set, entitled The Coronation of King George II, 1727. And, thrillingly performed by Robert King directing the King's Consort and the Choir of the King's Consort, there seems no good ...
This CD, a recording of a live performance by Paul van Nevel's choir of mixed voices, Huelgas Ensemble, features a program that is fraught with peril -- large-scale a cappella Renaissance music with 12 to 40 individual parts. To make it through such a treacherous program without a tonal train wreck would be an achievement, but the ensemble ...
"Why present just Handel's Coronation Anthems for King George II when you can present the whole Coronation?" seems to be the proposition that underlies this two-disc set, entitled The Coronation of King George II, 1727. And, thrillingly performed by Robert King directing the King's Consort and the Choir of the King's Consort, there seems no good ...
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