This collection of music by composer Luna Pearl Woolf garnered a 2020 Best Compendium Grammy Award nomination, and it admirably fulfills the purpose of that category. Woolf has had a good deal of music performed and recorded as a result of various commissions, but her work was in need of an overview that captured the inflections of her unique style. This it receives here. Many of Woolf's works are vocal, and even those that are not, such as a group of silent film scores, tend to have dramatic aspects. An excerpt from one of ...
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This collection of music by composer Luna Pearl Woolf garnered a 2020 Best Compendium Grammy Award nomination, and it admirably fulfills the purpose of that category. Woolf has had a good deal of music performed and recorded as a result of various commissions, but her work was in need of an overview that captured the inflections of her unique style. This it receives here. Many of Woolf's works are vocal, and even those that are not, such as a group of silent film scores, tend to have dramatic aspects. An excerpt from one of those might have made an interesting addition, but otherwise, the listener curious about Woolf will find a good place to start. Three of the works here are choral, and perhaps the most characteristic quality of Woolf's music is that it combines choral music's traditionally elevated aesthetic with contemporary concerns, most directly in the Missa in Fines Orbis Terrae (which has no Gloria or Credo). Après moi, le deluge sets texts about Hurricane Katrina in a sort of chamber concerto...
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