Handel Gothic Medium

Lisa Gerrard was so indelibly and obviously a part of what made Dead Can Dance what it is that it's little wonder that The Mirror Pool feels essentially like a continuation of that band's haunting, vast atmospheres. Without Brendan Perry's deep, rolling voice as a contrast, Gerrard's sky-sweeping abilities transform the entire recording into a truly mystical experience…

This 55-CD set chronicles the remarkable Archiv label, begun in 1947. Devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, the recordings presented here, in facsimiles of their original sleeves (a nice touch), cover the period from Gregorian chant to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, played on period instruments. There are stops in between for a great deal of Bach, music of the Gothic era, the French Baroque (Mouret, Delalande, Rameau, etc), Gibbons, Handel (Alcina, La Resurrezione, Messiah, Italian cantatas), Telemann, Zelenka, Gabrieli, Desprez, Haydn, LeJeune, and plenty of the usual, as well as unusual, suspects. There’s also a final CD with selections of new releases (more Handel, Cavalli, Gesualdo, Vivaldi).

This 50 CD Box Set includes Archiv Produktions finest analogue recordings made between 1959 and 1981, representing a Golden Age of a pioneering label that defined the way early music should be performed and recorded. Featured artists include Karl Richter, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Pierre Fournier, John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and other icons of the Archiv label.

You kind of get the sense from the Dark Tenor that anything other than 100% effort simply will not do. The marketing campaign is elaborate, slick and edgy, drawing in who-knows-what kind of audience and the voice and music matches it. The build up has been going on for some time; he's accumulated over 30,000 likes on Facebook before he even had a bar of music available for purchase. This is exciting stuff. The mysterious, masked Dark Tenor is signed to a major label, doing new things and creating larger than life arrangements and interpretations of classics we've always known but seldom recognise on his debut album Symphony of Light…

Like many of England's finest musicians, Andrew Lawrence-King began his career in choir school, serving as head chorister for the Cathedral and Parish Church of St. Peter Port, Guernsey. He took an organ scholarship to Cambridge University, where he read mathematics, but finished his studies in organ and voice at the London Early Music Centre. A party at a harpmaker's house gave the opportunity for Lawrence-King to own his first early harp, modeled after a Medieval Irish instrument.

The medieval concept of Venus’ Wheel is the symbolic framework for this collection of timeless choral works by the Danish composer Bo Holten (b. 1948). Himself a renowned conductor, Holten leads the Flemish Radio Choir on a passionate journey through the many facets of love, using the whole of musical history as a framework and sounding board for his own contemporary idiom.