To hear the choir members tell it, the Vasari Singers hit on the idea for this 40th-anniversary celebration album came more or less spontaneously, as they realized that they had often sung pieces about stars or the celestial realm. It's not surprising that a choir oriented toward British sacred music would have an album's worth of such music in their repertory, but the concept is nicely executed here. To hear the Vasari Singers' mastery of small-group textures, try their strikingly well-controlled reading of Eric Whitacre's ...
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To hear the choir members tell it, the Vasari Singers hit on the idea for this 40th-anniversary celebration album came more or less spontaneously, as they realized that they had often sung pieces about stars or the celestial realm. It's not surprising that a choir oriented toward British sacred music would have an album's worth of such music in their repertory, but the concept is nicely executed here. To hear the Vasari Singers' mastery of small-group textures, try their strikingly well-controlled reading of Eric Whitacre's ubiquitous Lux aurumque. Whitacre is one of just a few non-British composers included; there are two works by the mystical Eriks E?envalds for contrast, but the rest of the program is all British, and, with the exception of John Rutter's For the Beauty of the Earth, all composed since 1994. This gives the listener an idea of the broad range of expressive modes in contemporary British choral music, even as all of it is in an essentially tonal idiom, is unified by the themes of the...
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