Percy Grainger was a weird dude. This is most evident in his orchestrated choral music, here under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner leading his Monteverdi Choir and further aided by the English Country Gardiner Orchestra from 1996.
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.
Time for Living (1990). The music on this album is a blend of uplifting rhytmic and joyous melodies and soft relaxing tunes.
A Touch of Scandinavia (1996). On this album you can listen to Bindu's personal instrumental interpretation of 13 well-known Scandinavian folk songs. Sense the warm and peaceful atmosphere, imagine the clear blue sky and the enchanting summer nights and enjoy this little collection of beauties.
The third Garcia/Grisman album, this one concentrating on the traditional 'folk' song aspect of their repertoire.
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…