The English composer Alec Roth has been active for several decades and collaborated with Indian novelist Vikram Seth on an opera in the 1990s. Here he seems to tread into the profitable choral music territory mined by John Rutter. Although he is in no way a clone of Rutter, your reactions to that composer may give you an idea of how you'll feel about the Roth works here. Like many of Rutter's works, the four-section cantata A Time to Dance, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, complete with processional, prologue, epilogue, ...
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The English composer Alec Roth has been active for several decades and collaborated with Indian novelist Vikram Seth on an opera in the 1990s. Here he seems to tread into the profitable choral music territory mined by John Rutter. Although he is in no way a clone of Rutter, your reactions to that composer may give you an idea of how you'll feel about the Roth works here. Like many of Rutter's works, the four-section cantata A Time to Dance, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, complete with processional, prologue, epilogue, and "after-dance," draws on a wide range of classic English poetry and sets the poems in an accessible style with a clearly defined sequence of events. Each of the four sections, representing a season, is dominated by a single soloist, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass in turn. The instrumentation is that of Bach's Magnificat, BWV 243, for which A Time to Dance was composed as a companion piece; it may be performed on either period instruments (used here) or modern ones. Superimposed...
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