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Артист: Berlin Radio Choir Альбом: Choral Works for 40 Voices, 2005 Издатель: Harmonia Mundi / HMC 801873 Жанр: Classical / Choral Music Формат файла: EAC / APE / CUE / LOG Ссылка: CD Нахождение: Torrent

Choral Works for 40 Voices


Berlin Radio Choir
Simon Halsey - conductor

Arvid Gast - organ



Gregorian Chant - Veni, creator spiritus
Thomas Tallis - Spem in alium
Henry Purcell - Hear my prayer, O Lord
J.S.Bach - Contrapunctus 1 (from Art of Fugue)
J.S.Bach - Contrapunctus 1 (realisation: Dietrich Schnebel)
Jonathan Harvey - Come, Holy Ghost
Knut Nystedt - Immortal Bach
Zoltan Kodaly - Laudes Organi
Henry Purcell/Sven-David Sandstrom - Hear my prayer, O Lord
Antony Pitts - XL
Gregorian Chant - Veni, creator spiritus (reprise)



A large-scale portrait of a large (and great) choir
There is indeed scale and grandeur aplenty in this adventure in sonorities! Here is a rare occasion to relive five centuries of choral polyphony, from the forty (different!) voices of Thomas Tallis’s famous motet Spem in alium to the admiring tribute to it by Anthony Pitts, appropriately named XL – as in forty voices, but also as in ‘eXtra Large’...

As we celebrate the 500th anniversary of Tallis' birth, a problem that many choirs and choral directors will be tackling is what to do with forty singers once they have been organised. Conductor Simon Halsey commissioned Antony Pitts to write a piece designed as companion for Thomas Tallis' 40-part masterwork, Spem in alium. Between these two chronological extremes, are other similarly emblematic works of the seventeenth (Purcell), eighteenth (Bach) and twentieth centuries (Kodaly, Harvey, Sandstrom), all displaying the vocal mastery of the professional Rundfunkchor Berlin.


The opening is Tallis’ best-known motet, which happens to be originally for 40 voices, bringing them in one per bar until all are heard by bar 40. Antony Pitts’ XL, after which the disc is named, is also for 40 voices and also uses part of Psalm 40 as text. His tribute to Tallis is in three parts and Pitts moves the voices thru the choir in the opposite direction from what was heard in the Tallis motet. In the Purcell work, Ligeti pupil Sandstrom borrows one of the themes and in the second part of the work builds a new section out of it. This is one of three tracks on the disc accompanied by pipe organ; all the rest are a cappella.

The first of the two Art of Fugue excerpts is Bach’s original for solo pipe organ; then we hear a realization of that theme for mixed choir by Schnebel. The next tracks is similar, presenting first the well-known Gregorian chant Veni Creator Spiritus, quoted by Mahler in the first movement of his Eighth Symphony, followed by Jonathan Harvey’s Come, Holy Ghost, which takes the chant thru several variations, including atonal improvisation. Nystedt’s tribute to Bach takes the short chorale Come Sweet Death and overlaps it in different sections of the choir in a circle plus moving it around spatially among them. The result is strangely avant, yet at the same time familiar. The closing work by Zoltan Kodaly, who wrote numerous choral pieces, was his final composition at age 83. It emulates a Renaissance style of polyphony and uses for text a 12th century Swiss manuscript devoted to praise of the pipe organ.

This post has been edited by kgkk on 09-06-2007, 22:47