British conductor Stephen Layton is one of few European conductors to take an active interest in 20th and 21st century American choral music; he and the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, have already released three albums devoted to a cappella music by the two most prominent American choral composers of turn of the millennium, Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre. This disc features the works of eight composers, seven from the U.S. and one from Canada. For the most part, these pieces are less distinctive than those by ...
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British conductor Stephen Layton is one of few European conductors to take an active interest in 20th and 21st century American choral music; he and the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, have already released three albums devoted to a cappella music by the two most prominent American choral composers of turn of the millennium, Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre. This disc features the works of eight composers, seven from the U.S. and one from Canada. For the most part, these pieces are less distinctive than those by Lauridsen and Whitacre, who each have a clearly recognizable sound, and the idiom of most of these pieces tends to be more conservative than theirs. Canadian Healey Willan, writing in the first decades of the 20th century, is strongly reminiscent of (if not indistinguishable from) British composers like Parry and Stanford. Stephen Paulus, writing three quarters of a century later, uses an unruffled euphonious tonal vocabulary not far removed from Willan's, but his three works included...
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