Philippe Manoury is not a composer whose music is especially well-known in the English-speaking world, but he is one of the leading French composers of his time. This disc of his a cappella choral works should appeal not only to fans of new music for chorus, but anyone who enjoyed György Ligeti's numinous Requiem and Lux aeterna in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Manoury has a strong background in electronic music, and that interest is evident in his atmospheric, often diaphanous webs of sound. For the most part he ...
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Philippe Manoury is not a composer whose music is especially well-known in the English-speaking world, but he is one of the leading French composers of his time. This disc of his a cappella choral works should appeal not only to fans of new music for chorus, but anyone who enjoyed György Ligeti's numinous Requiem and Lux aeterna in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Manoury has a strong background in electronic music, and that interest is evident in his atmospheric, often diaphanous webs of sound. For the most part he dispenses with any clearly defined feeling of pulse, creating an otherworldly atmosphere of gradually evolving harmonies and textures. In some of the pieces, like Fragments d'Héraclite, the text is set plainly enough to be comprehensible, but in others, like Slova, the texts are largely lost in the complex of multilayered textures. When a pure consonance blooms out of a glowing, harmonically dense cloud, its clarity can be as radiant as a shaft of sunlight. The mysterious and evocative...
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