This release from the National Youth Choir of Scotland and Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Christopher Bell fits a common pattern: it offers music from various parts of the British Isles and beyond. Yet the singers, musicians, and conductor seem intent on stretching the pattern with unusually sharp and diverse music. The titular Cantos Sagrados (Sacred Songs) of James MacMillan have been recorded before, but the vigorous performance here of these not-strictly-sacred songs (the texts include political elements) may ...
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This release from the National Youth Choir of Scotland and Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Christopher Bell fits a common pattern: it offers music from various parts of the British Isles and beyond. Yet the singers, musicians, and conductor seem intent on stretching the pattern with unusually sharp and diverse music. The titular Cantos Sagrados (Sacred Songs) of James MacMillan have been recorded before, but the vigorous performance here of these not-strictly-sacred songs (the texts include political elements) may come closest to the spirit of the work. Eric Whitacre's Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, with a text in English and Italian by Charles Anthony Silvestri, is an unusually narrative work for this composer, imagining a dream of Leonardo da Vinci, while the same composer's When David Heard is a highly dramatic setting of that age-old motet text ("When David heard that Absalom was slain..."). Thea Musgrave's On the Underground, Set 2: The Strange and the Exotic imagines, among other...
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