Sally Oldfiled is the lesser known sister of musician Mike Oldfield who is most famous for TUBULAR BELLS, the theme from the original EXORCIST. The quality of her voice cannot be denied nor can her talent at arranging and orchestrating…
The Hedos Ensemble was established in 1988 for the purpose of performing ensemble music of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in various instrumentations. Singers (such as the baritone Hartmut Hein on this recording) and instrumentalists join the core group of instrumentalists as required in order to present an extensive as well as diverse repertoire of chamber music from the Renaissance to the Baroque…
The songs in this collection span a period of over four hundred years, yet they show a fundamental unity of style which illustrates how static a genre based in a tradition of apparently untrained music-making necessarily remained. Tudor court composers conjure up an Arcadian world of innocence, while later works often derive from indigenous folk-songs. Either way, the secular song packages and sanitises a dangerous world of rustic abandon for an audience more restrictively cultured.
The Music of Armenia is a superb, 3 CDs the amazingly diverse music of Armenia. There are chants, folk tunes, instrumental music and rich choral harmonies in a collection that underscores the stunning and far too little acknowledged creative density of Armenian culture.