Swr Vokalensemble Stuttgart

The folk music of the Baltic peoples can be traced back to pagan times whereas the development of their art music did not start until around 100 years ago. Every country has it's own founding fathers where music is concerned: the Estonians admire Heino Eller and the Latvians Jazeps Vitols as the founder of their respective national music culture. Arvo Part was one of Eller's students. The founding figure of Lithuanian art music and art is Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, who created fugues and sonatas as well as symphonic poems, music for piano, and choral works. This is the ninth and last installment of the SWR Vokalensemble series dedicated to musical portraits of different countries and the last release with it's chief conductor Marcus Creed. The SWR Vokalensemble is internationally renowned as one of the best choirs for modern a cappella repertoire, it's performances are characterized by exquisite mastership.

Between 1820 and 1847, Felix Mendelssohn composed a total of 38 songs for a cappella male voices. Many of these were written for his own use at home or in the company of friends. He also liked to personally gift or dedicate these songs to others. This recording by the male voices of the SWR Vokalensemble under conductor Frieder Bernius affords the opportunity to enjoy these wonderful compositions that are among the least explored parts of Mendelssohn’s vast oeuvre.

This is a new installment in the SWR Vokalensemble's country series. It contains excellent performances of rarely performed and recorded choral works. The SWR Vokalensemble is among the best choirs in the world. The accompanying booklet contains the Japanese texts of the works. In it's more than 2000-year history Japan has developed it's own, independent music, whose principal means of expression are single tones and tonal color, which is used in quite a broad spectrum, including sounds. References to nature and it's sounds is another aspect of great significance. This album presents a selection of choral works which were composed after 1950, at a time when a lot of Japanese composers began to free themselves from European and American music as their model and started to develop individual styles. In doing so, they also used elements of Japan's musical tradition and integrated them into their own musical language in various ways.

French intellectuals, especially musicians and writers, were enchanted by the magic of Richard Wagner's music, but they earnestly wanted to pursue new ideas for what might follow. They believed that music and art should be free from 'German elements' and they consequently wanted to establish a decidedly contrasting, French style of music. It was for this reason that Gabriel Fauré and Camille Saint-Saëns set up the Societé Nationale de Musique in 1871, tasking it with supporting new French compositions. Successive composers were fascinated by new developments in the great French music tradition and experimented with modal alternatives and aspects of counterpoint. Compositional clarity was expected to express the simple but poetic relationship between music and text, drawing on graceful melodic lines and a Renaissance-like serenity of expression.

In this latest installment of recordings focusing on the choral traditions of different countrys choral music traditions launched last year by the Vokalensemble Stuttgart des SWR, we now arrive in sunny Italy, a country said to have no native choral tradition. Giuseppe Verdi of course used choirs in his operas, but apart from that there are only a few choral works that have sustained any place in the repertoire, some of the finest of which are presented here. With the beginning of the 20th century, however, one encounters composers that are less well known, but whom have certainly composed some very exciting music for choir, including Pizzetti, Giacinto Scelsi, Luigi Nono and Goffredo Petrassi.

Diese CD bietet eine breite Palette russischer Komponisten, die in der Tradition orthodoxer Kirchenmusik komponierten. Sie reicht von Michail Glinka, Peter Tschaikowsky, Sergej Tanejew und Sergej Rachmaninoff bis zu Alfred Schnittke und Sofia Gubaidulina, von romantisch-expressiven Vertonungen bis zu den expressiven Klängen der beiden neueren Komponisten.

Great Britain's music culture is marked by a centuries-old tradition of choral singing, as is shown, for instance, in the institution of college choirs. Church policy had a beneficial effect on the development of sacred music. After the Anglican Church separated from Rome in the 16th c. and the abbeys were secularized, many cathedral choirs were founded which took over the Holy Office from the monastic communities. The fact that sacred choral music in the British Isles is still written largely with an orientation to liturgical purposes must be understood as an effect of this constellation. The close relationship between the way composers and performers work, moreover, explains the tendency of a large portion of this art to be addressed to the general public.

Das SWR Vokalensemble gehört zu den besten Chören der Welt. Ein weiterer Baustein in der Serie mit Chorwerken aus verschiedenen Ländern. Sehr selten aufgeführte Werke von Szymanowski, Gorecki, Haubenstock-Ramati und Lutoslawski, den bedeutendsten polnischen Komponisten. Dass Polen besonders im 20. Jahrhundert so viele und so herausragende Komponisten hervorgebracht hat, ist angesichts der politischen Geschichte des Landes sehr überraschend. Nach dem 2. Weltkrieg und nach Stalins Tod brach sich auf dem Musikfestival 'Warschauer Herbst' 1956 die aufgestaute Kreativität Bahn und es präsentierte sich das ungeheure musikalische Potential des Landes einer erstaunten Weltöffentlichkeit.

The SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart is one of the few choirs enjoying an international reputation. Their latest recording has “America” as its subject - and presents a tremendously wide range of forms and expressions, from music written under the influence of European masters to works that boldly explore experiments in aesthetic reorientation. The big names of the U.S. composers are of course represented, including Leonard Bernstein with his single a cappella work, the “Missa Brevis”, Steve Reich with his minimalist “Proverb” and John Cage with some of his late “Number Pieces”. Everything is presented at the highest artistic level, with ravishing sonics that cannot be beat.