Jutland Academic Choir - Works By Grieg Lange-Muller Hartmann - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Although this overview of Cavalli's music is necessarily condensed, it nonetheless succeeds in painting a meaningful picture of both the nature of opera as it was developing in Venice at the time, and the composer's own artistic and compositional talent. Cavalli was of course influenced by Monteverdi, yet he imbued his music with his own individual style, in effect setting the artistic seal on the rest of the seventeenth century. The tales told by these early operas had a lot in common with our soap story-lines. Heroes undergo the unlikeliest of hardships, become involved in unrestrained love affairs, get caught out in embarrassing situations, and so on, only for everything to be rapidly unraveled for an unambiguously happy ending, removing all concerns from the minds of a rapt audience (the operatic star system had not yet established itself at this point). There was a sense of liberation from the purely aural allusiveness of the madrigal form, as well as from the compositional and performance difficulties also associated with it, and an increasing interest in the visual impact of the sets and costumes that were soon to become the norm. Madrigal quartets, quintets and sextets were on their way out, seen as music for an aesthetic elite, to be replaced by the more approachable duets. There is perhaps an analogy to be drawn with our own times, in which the spoken and written word are being replaced by a TV videocracy, whose power is taking hold in the same way as opera did in the seventeenth century. By happy coincidence, however, Cavalli was born at precisely the right time and place, and his genius was translated into intricate, convoluted love stories and impetuous passions and rages expressed with perfect aesthetic and expressive musical symbiosis in masterly passacaglias. The Lament can be seen as a kind of condensed version of this artistic sensibility, an opera i

Alasdair Roberts' approach as a singer and songwriter, now halfway through it's third decade, has been devoted to the history of traditional songs, playing them forward into our ever-evolving world as their meanings continue to evolve as well. Whether singing the auld songs, using inspiration from a line of text, or taking a time-honoured air as a starting point to a new song, he has pushed the tradition ahead in ways that few other singers and writers have approached. On The Fiery Margin, he taps the percussive elan of Alex Neilson (Trembling BellsInch) and the expansive bass playing of Stevie Jones, who have paired together with him on a couple of previous albums. On their previous encounter, Pangs, Alasdair focused on electric guitar, which gave the music a lean and wild quality that drew comparisons to the British folk scene of the classic rock era. The Fiery Margin moves fluidly from acoustic to electric guitars while adding the nimble playing of Irish violist Ailbhe nic Oireachtaigh to embody and expand the parameters of the material. Additional players bring touches of accordion, pedal steel guitar, saxophone and barbershop vocals (!), aiding Alasdair's process of excavating the mysterious roots of our shared music from a consonant, yet still enigmatic depth.1. False Flesh2. The Evernew Tongue3. Europe4. Comments5. A Keen6. The Stranger With the Scythe7. Actors8. Common Clay9. Learning Is Eternal10. The Untrue Womb

Collegium Musicum Choir & Orchestra - Contemporary Norwegian Works for Choir [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/26/2018