Lassus / Haussmann - Sibylla-Renaissance Music & New Music - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Lassus / Pro Cantione Antiqua - Musica Dei Donum [COMPACT DISCS] date 09/17/2010

Hannah Williams, the British soul hurricane who sensationally became part of Jay-Z's chart-topping 4 44 album, is primed and ready for her own national and international breakthrough. Williams turned heads worldwide when the hip-hop superstar sampled her heart-stopping vocals on 'Late Nights & Heartbreak' for the title track, '4.44' on his 2017 album. Now Hannah and her exemplary, Bristol-based band the Affirmations deliver a definitive career statement with the drop-dead soulful new album 50 Foot Woman which will be released October 18th on the Milan based imprint Record Kicks. The album captures all of the visceral power of the band's increasingly legendary live performances. Shades of classic Soul and Psychedelic Funk blend uniquely with modern-day flavors on a record destined to set the soul agenda for 2019 and far beyond. InchI've never been as proud of anything in my entire careerInch says Hannah. Born in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Williams' father was a musically gifted minister, and her mother let her join the church choir at the age of six. Hannah could read music before she could properly read words, and when she discovered soul by listening with her mum to Motown and Bill Withers, there was no turning back. After a 2012 debut with her previous band the Tastemakers, it was 2016's Late Nights & Heartbreak that announced the arrival of Hannah Williams and the Affirmations. But little did she know that Jay-Z was listening. One day, at her then-day job running the music department at the University of Winchester, he sent her a text. Once she'd established that it wasn't a wind-up, and summoned the courage to call him back, she learned that Jay-Z's producer, No I.D., had played him Hannah's track to inspire his response to Beyoncé's Lemonade, on which she sang of his infidelities. Williams was as in the dark about how 'Late Nights & Heartbreak' would be use

Literally meaning 'rooster song' or 'cock crow', Gallicantus takes it's name from monastic antiquity; the name of the office held just before dawn, it was a ceremony which evoked the renewal of life offered by the coming day. Dedicated to renaissance music and directed by Gabriel Crouch, the membership of this early music group boasts a wealth of experience in consort singing. Renowned for their critically-acclaimed and researched programmes, Gallicantus presents Sibylla. At the heart of the programme is Orlandus Lassus's 16th Century Prophetiae Sibyllarum, which sets to music the texts of ancient Sibylline prophecies telling of the coming of Christ. One of the composer's most renowned and celebrated works, it is performed alongside settings by the 'Sibyl of the Rhine' Hildegard von Bingen, as well contemporary responses to Lassus's work. Dmitri Tymoczko's Prophetiae Sibyllarum sets poems by Jeff Dolven which recast the sibyls' role this time to the teller of grim truths of present life in post-industrial America. As an epilogue the album finishes with Elliot Cole's 'I saw you under the fig tree' (part of his suite Visions) - a simple 4-part setting beneath an extraordinary countertenor glissando, setting Jesus Christ's response to Nathaniel.