Bellini,V. / Spencer,Charles - Emanuele D'aguanno - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The Swedish Chamber Choir makes it's debut on Chandos with this fascinating programme of works for choir, choir and solo voice, and for choir and violin. The founder and conductor, Simon Phipps, leads the choir in unaccompanied works by Swedish and British composers. Maria Forsstrom joins them in one of Mahler's Ruckert Lieder, InchIch bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,Inch in a sixteen-part arrangement by Clytus Gottwald, and in Judith Bingham's 'The Drowned Lovers,' a stark companion piece to Stanford's 'The Blue Bird.' The violinist Jennifer Pike joins the Choir in Ola Gjeilo's stunning 'Serenity' (a setting of O magnum mysterium) and Paul Drayton's outstanding 2018 arrangement of Vaughan Williams's 'The Lark Ascending,' for violin and chamber choir.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the eruption of Romanticism was not only a disruptive element which was capable of distorting the aesthetic and conceptual canons of the music of the time but it also brought about a series of noteworthy technical improvements in the organological sector. Without this change a number of instruments could not have expressed what was requested by composers and performers involved in this new cultural and artistic revolution - a revolution that, within a few decades, was able to build new cathedrals on the ruins of European Baroque. This record is a tribute to the extraordinary adventure of the flute through the nineteenth century, which is when this instrument increasingly assumed a stylistically independent connotation, which allowed it to become part of that group of musical instruments (such as the violin and the piano) which appealed to the cultured and well-off middle classes. This was in particular due to it's capacity to InchchallengeInch the human voice, the lyrical singing, reviving, through transcription, the famous lyrical works, the arias, well known and loved by both the aristocratic class and the humblest people alike. The choice of these compositions, therefore, focuses on the InchbelcantoInch repertoire revised in light of the potential of the transverse flute.

V. Bellini - Norma [COMPACT DISCS] date 03/01/2005