John Zorn - Interzone - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Hermann Stef nsson - 7 Deadly Sins Swedish Music for Clarinet & Piano [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/29/2003

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.

Masques, the title of this album, is a reference to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet; it mirrors his visionary music, so full of wit, color and drama, that expresses every possible human emotion. The thousand characters created by the music are both actors in and spectators of their own lives by turns. The Sonata No. 1 is a truly epic work; it leads us from an anguish-laden grief permeated with a gust of wind from the grave to a nostalgic lyricism - the memory of a lost paradise? - that is then driven by tremendous rhythmic energy to the apocalyptic climax of the work we experience an explosion, a dissolution of every hope, before a return to the frozen whiteness of the beginning and an ending in resignation. The Sonata No. 2, unrestrainedly lyrical and punctuated with humour, can be seen as a contrasting counterpart to the previous work. The also includes the undervalued Sonata for solo violin and two miniatures in Prokofiev's characteristic style they are filled with alacrity, humour and biting wit - an extract of life!