Polyphony

The Golden Age of English Polyphony - The Sixteen, Harry Christophers (2009) {10CD Set Hyperion CDS44401~10}
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© 2009 Hyperion Records | CDS44401~10
Classical / Early Music / Renaissance / Polyphony / Plainchant

When The Sixteen embarked upon their recording career back in 1982, few would have been able to predict quite how successful they would become, or how far they would go towards rehabilitating the little-known and barely recorded music of these four master composers of the sixteenth century. In this their 30th anniversary year, we join them in celebrating a Golden Age of Polyphony, and of music-making, by presenting their twelve discs of this repertoire in an attractively packaged (and priced) 10-CD remastered set.

Arvo Pärt - Triodion and Other Choral Works - Polyphony & Stephen Layton (2003) {Hyperion SACD Hybrid SACDA67375}
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© 2003 Hyperion | SACD Hybrid | SACDA67375
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Choral

A new release from Polyphony, with Stephen Layton at the helm, always brings with it an assurance of singing of the highest possible calibre. Bring together a choir of such quality and the composer responsible for some of the most beautiful, transcendent music ever written, and the resultant disc is surely what must be one of, if not the most spectacular releases of the year. New works from Arvo Pärt are invariably cherished, and this disc contains no fewer than five world premiere recordings—Dopo la vittoria, Nunc dimittis, Littlemore Tractus, My heart's in the Highlands and Salve regina. It was recorded in the presence of the enraptured composer earlier this year at the Temple Church, London. This is a disc of achingly lovely music at its most mesmeric—prepare to be stunned.

Once, Portugal ruled the waves, sending explorers round the Cape of Good Hope to India and across the wide Atlantic to Brazil. After the death of King Sebastian and the end of the Age of Discovery, however, Spain ruled Portugal, and it is from this period that the works on the disc called Masterpieces of Portuguese Polyphony come. But although the sacred a cappella music here was clearly influenced by the Spanish sacred a cappella music of the same period, it is still clearly not Spanish music. In these beautifully sculpted and richly textured performances by the Choir of Westminster Cathedral under Master of Music James O'Donnell, there is a clarity, a lightness, an openness, and a spiritual optimism evident that Spanish music from the same period often lacks. Featuring five motets and a set of Lamentations by Manuel Cardoso, a Panis angelicus by João Lourenço Rebelo, five motets and a Magnificat by Pedro de Cristo, and an Alma rememptoris mater by Aires Fernandez, this 2007 reissue largely consists of works heretofore known only to listeners who heard the disc when it was first released in 1992, but anyone who enjoys sacred choral music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century will surely enjoy this disc. Hyperion's sound is lush, round, and full.

Les Sonadori - Cantate Violini! (Florid early baroque songs & polyphony) (2019) {Passacaille 1056}
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© 2019 Passacaille | 1056
Classical / Renaissance / Early Baroque / Period Instruments

The most beautiful polyphonic canzoni, chansons, motets and madrigals, were used like today’s pop standards in the 16th century; musicians would improvise on them, tailoring their playing and imagination to each other. The colourful and varied selection of works on this recording is made up of different combinations of voices and instruments. A special aspect, a kind of renaissance violin band stands at the centre of this project: ensembles of violins were generally used to accompany certain moments in the Mass, at banquets, receptions, princely entertainments, entries into cities and palaces, diplomatic negotiations and sacred and secular processions as well as the long hours of dancing that followed the evening meal in northern Italy from the 1530s onwards, until the 1580s and 1590s announced the arrival of the new baroque style.

The general trend in recordings of Renaissance polyphony has been toward typing music to specific surroundings: royal festivities, religious feast days, and the like. This collection by the Huelgas Ensemble goes in the other direction, providing three CDs' worth of music ranging from the medieval era to Anton Bruckner, with most of the pieces falling into some stretch of the High Renaissance. The music was recorded, beautifully, in a Romanesque church near Dijon in 2018, and the program is unified loosely by a set of general guidelines for the selections at that event: the music emphasized "unknown repertoire, undeservedly obscure composers, and experiments that fall outside the scope of the normal concert season."

György Ligeti - Double Concerto, San Francisco Polyphony, etc. (1987) {BIS-CD-53}
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© 1974-87, 1987 Grammofon AB BIS | BIS-CD-53
Classical / Chamber Music / Concerto / Modern Classical / Modern Composition

In 1961, the young Hungarian composer György Ligeti did a pretty amazing thing: he wrote a piece called Atmospheres, in which almost nothing happens, extremely slowly. The European avant-garde was still obsessed with quantifying musical parameters, with crystallizing pitch, duration, timbre, and register into rigid regions, radiating with speed and hardness – and then Ligeti cast out this massive orchestral goo, the enemy of all geometries, devoid of contours and as slow and gaseous as a trip through Saturn. A paean to all mysterious and intangible, Atmospheres initialized both a brilliant swerve from the music of its time, and a kind of life-journey for Ligeti's own incipient voice: a musical vision on the verge of disintegration, inventively trying to put itself back together, to re-integrate.

When King’s College, Cambridge was founded by King Henry VI in 1441, careful provision was made for a choral foundation of sixteen men and sixteen choristers to sing daily services in the Chapel. English worshippers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were generous when it came to music, making regular donations and bequests to churches and monasteries, so that masses could be sung for the salvation of their souls. It is no coincidence that the music of this era should therefore have reached new heights of richness and complexity; indeed, England was home to some of the most elaborate polyphony composed anywhere in Europe.