This collection carries the subtitle "The Music of Roxanna Panufnik," and indeed it would make a good place to start with the popular contemporary British composer. On the surface level, her trademark crimson lipstick is prominently displayed. And the music represents two distinct registers in Panufnik's music, the full-blown style of the Westminster Mass and a somewhat simpler and less chromatic idiom exemplified by the short hymns of the set Angels Sing!, originally written in Polish for a London neighborhood church but ...
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This collection carries the subtitle "The Music of Roxanna Panufnik," and indeed it would make a good place to start with the popular contemporary British composer. On the surface level, her trademark crimson lipstick is prominently displayed. And the music represents two distinct registers in Panufnik's music, the full-blown style of the Westminster Mass and a somewhat simpler and less chromatic idiom exemplified by the short hymns of the set Angels Sing!, originally written in Polish for a London neighborhood church but here performed in English translation. At a more specific level still, much of the music on the album shows the tendency for Panufnik's music to keep evolving after its premiere. The Westminster Mass, which is divided up in the program in an approximation of liturgical practice, exists in versions for organ and for orchestra, but the present version, for organ, bells, and harp along with the choir, is especially fortunate; the mass is structured, both in obvious ways and in subtler...
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