If you dipped into the music at random, you might guess that Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds shares the minimalist style of many of his Baltic contemporaries. There are sparse, limpid passages, but elsewhere he is lush, with dense multipart textures that push the limits of tonality. Esenvalds deploys various languages in the service of texts that he, with some effort, devises himself: the final Passion and Resurrection here is not a setting of a preexisting religious text, but consists, somewhat in the manner of John ...
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If you dipped into the music at random, you might guess that Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds shares the minimalist style of many of his Baltic contemporaries. There are sparse, limpid passages, but elsewhere he is lush, with dense multipart textures that push the limits of tonality. Esenvalds deploys various languages in the service of texts that he, with some effort, devises himself: the final Passion and Resurrection here is not a setting of a preexisting religious text, but consists, somewhat in the manner of John Rutter, of texts assembled from various sources by the composer himself. All the variations in musical language are deployed in the service of the texts, which may be quite unusual. Some may feel that Esenvalds' method works better in smaller works, where the unusual quality of his text selection is vividly illustrated, than in the Passion setting. For this, the first recording of the composer's works in North America (it's indicative of his success that the album has been commercially...
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