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Danish recorder virtuoso Michala Petri had collaborated with a choir several times during her career, but she found her 2007 experience with Swedish composer Daniel Börtz (b. 1943) especially rewarding. Following the Stockholm premiere of Börtz’s Nemesis divina, Petri and guitarist husband Lars Hannibal, who produces her recordings for their own label, actively began to seek out further choral...
I well remember the first time I heard a piece of Schnittke’s, as a student at the Huddersfield Festival, the Concerto Grosso No.1. I was intrigued, surprised, found it funny and disturbing in equal measure and couldn’t wait to hear more. As time went on I became more and more disappointed – convinced that all his pieces were the same package tied up with different coloured string. The...
Some of the best choral discs, in my mind, have come from British choirs exploring repertoire outside of the English choral tradition. So many of the staples of the cathedral, church and college chapel diet have been recorded so many times that it seems impossible to think of anyone who could commit something different to disc. This is not to say that they will not, Cathedral and particularly...
Is there a contemporary American choral music sound? A growing number of American composers have banded around a style based on rich harmonies, luxurious textures and a spare expressive ethos.
Led by figures like Eric Whitacre and Stephen Paulus, these composers have arisen from a nexus of skilled American choirs, largely outside the realm of academic modernism or downtown styles. They have begun...
If this is a representative cross-section of unaccompanied American choral music since the Second World War, it shows a genre in which beauty of sound and an atmosphere of prayerfulness are the chief characteristics. With the exception of London-born Healy Willan, whose music here often sounds like animated Herbert Howells, these composers concentrate on little else, although few do it with such...
All but two of the composers represented here are still alive, so the word “contemporary” might easily have been added to its title. But then, that might have put people off; best avoid it, perhaps. Choral conductors will be familiar with most of these names, the general music lover probably less so. In recent years a powerful movement of approachable yet recognisably modern choral music has...