The Hilliard Ensemble

Outstanding folk-jazz album. I think this is my favourite Garbarek album; it is tightly-focused, composed and performed. The whole album evokes life in the northwoods and carries a real outdoors feel. The best tracks are Molde 4, His Eyes Were Suns, and the title track, but each cut is interesting and moving. My only complaint is that the production is somewhat suspect. I find myself needing to adjust the volume constantly – either the sax is too loud or the background too quiet. I own the original CD, though, not the remaster. Maybe the remaster is normalized a little better.

Wolfgang Rihm - Et Lux - Huelgas Ensemble, Minguet Quartett, Paul Van Nevel (2015) {ECM New Series 2404}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 221 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 146 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (pdf+jpg) -> 9 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2015 ECM Records | ECM New Series 2404
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Choral / Chamber Music / Strings

From a composer whose vast output plunders the stylistic gamut of western musical history and then some, here is a single movement requiem full of clean lines and troubled introspection. Et Lux is a 2009 composition for voices and string quartet in which Rihm dwells on certain phrases of the Latin death mass – particularly the notion of eternal light, which he calls “comforting yet deeply disturbing”. The same could be said of Et Lux as a whole. Tropes waft in from across the ages: this music treads the line of tangibility, with sudden rushes of anger or fondness and the messy half-memories that come with grief. The strings complete phrases that the singers can’t seem to summon. Conductor Paul van Nevel doubles the vocal parts to create broad, generous textures that sound lovely and lush against the strings’ icy clarity – all qualities that ECM’s engineers are expert at capturing.

It's always great to encounter the recording that can "crack" a composer open, making his or her music accessible to a general listening public. And it's all the better when such a recording comes from beyond the usual quarters, as, for example, with this American recording of Renaissance polyphony. Nicolas Gombert was a Flemish Renaissance composer, a successor (and possibly a student) of Josquin who entered the service of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His music, especially in his masses, tends to present itself as a dense, unbroken flow of polyphony. Gombert is one of the composers music history students tend to slog through in hopes of getting to the good stuff. One noted Renaissance scholar used to refer to him, Adrian Willaert, and Giaches de Wert as "the Ert brothers." All that could change with this disc of Gombert motets and chansons. These works are less dense than his masses, but not by much, and they are considerably less limpid than Josquin's pieces in the same genres. But here it is the performances that clarify them. The Massachusetts ensemble Capella Alamire (the name is a pun on an aspect of an old solmization system) under director Peter Urquhart, recording in a church in Portsmouth, NH, slows the motets down slightly and addresses them with a group of eight singers – the black belt of choral singing.

The Tallis Scholars - Sing Tudor Church Music, Vol. 2
Music written by Sheppard, Tallis, White
2xCD | EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 575 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Gimell Records # CDGIM 210 | Country/Year: UK 2008
Genre: Classical | Style: Renaissance, Sacred, Vocal

"…For those newcomers to this group, suffice it to say that you will rarely find an ensemble as carefully rehearsed or skillfully prepared for the repertory they choose to engage in—simply one of the finest ever, legendary, and there has never been a disc they have released that has gotten less that rave reviews…" ~audiophile-audition

The Tallis Scholars - Sing Tudor Church Music, Vol .1
Music written by Browne, Cornysh, Taverner, Tye
2xCD | EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 621 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Gimell Records # CDGIM 209 | Country/Year: UK 2008
Genre: Classical | Style: Renaissance, Sacred, Vocal

"…For those newcomers to this group, suffice it to say that you will rarely find an ensemble as carefully rehearsed or skillfully prepared for the repertory they choose to engage in—simply one of the finest ever, legendary, and there has never been a disc they have released that has gotten less that rave reviews…" ~audiophile-audition

It must have been difficult to find a suitable programme to follow the Gabrieli Consort’s triumphant recording of Victoria’s Requiem (Archiv, 12/95), but with this disc of Morales’s Missa Mille regretz this has certainly been achieved, and with a logical connection to the previous release.