Based on a handful of skillfully crafted, warmly accessible choral works, Morten Lauridsen has achieved a degree of fame and attracted a devoted following rare for a contemporary American composer. His published output is small, consisting of less than two dozen complete works (although the number grows somewhat when individual movements of larger works are counted, and various arrangements of the same piece). He is best-known for "Dirait-on," from his choral cycle, Les Chansons des Roses, settings of poetry by Rainer Maria ...
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Based on a handful of skillfully crafted, warmly accessible choral works, Morten Lauridsen has achieved a degree of fame and attracted a devoted following rare for a contemporary American composer. His published output is small, consisting of less than two dozen complete works (although the number grows somewhat when individual movements of larger works are counted, and various arrangements of the same piece). He is best-known for "Dirait-on," from his choral cycle, Les Chansons des Roses, settings of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. Lauridsen's French text setting is execrably unidiomatic, but it hardly matters because the music is so ravishingly lyrical and memorably melodic that it has nearly acquired the kind of iconic timelessness of a piece like Barber's Adagio. Even on first hearing, it sounds familiar, as if it had always existed, and it lodges itself so firmly in the ear and mind that for many listeners, it's difficult to imagine a point at which it was not a part of their consciousness. The a...
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