Cambridge Singers a Capella_音乐专辑
Cambridge Singers a Capella
表演者: Cambridge Singers/Rutter
介质: Audio CD
发行时间: 2003-02-25
唱片数: 1
出版者: Collegium
条形码: 0040888050926
专辑简介
The music heard on this recording is selected from the great wealth of a cappella choral repertoire written in Germany, France and England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purity and beauty of the sound of unaccompanied choir was always recognized, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth century virtually no music was written for choir alone, since voices were almost invariable combined with instruments during this period. Under the influence of the Romantic movement, with its love of the past, interest in a cappella singing began to revive in the early nineteenth century, a revival which paralleled the slightly later pre-Raphaelite movement in the visual arts. The Cecilian movement was active in Germany and France, while in England madrigal societies began to revive secular unaccompanied singing for mixed voices, and the glee clues (like their German counterpart the Liedertafeln) cultivated male-voice music. These trends can be seen at work in the music of Pearsall and Schumann, the two earliest composers represented here: Pearsall wrote madrigals for the Bristol Madrigal Society, and Schumann his Op. 141 pieces at the time he was directing a newly-established choral society in Dresden. A little later Brahms instituted a female-voice choir in Hamburg, conducting and composing a cappella music regularly. By the end of the nineteenth century the a cappella medium was firmly re-established, though it retained archaic overtones: Debussy’s Trois chansons de Charles d’Orleans and Ravel’s Trois Chansons both deliberately evoke the style of the Renaissance chanson. Even for the generation of Poulenc and Britten, a sense of looking back remained: Poulenc set traditional rhymes in his Chansons francaises, while Britten used ‘old’ compositional devices in his Hymn to St. Cecilia. Yet Britten instinctively realized and brought to the fore a more crucial quality of the a cappella medium: its essentially pure, distilled nature, enabling it to reflect the inner soul of music itself. It was no accident that unaccompanied choir was his chose medium for setting poetry invoking a saint regarded as the ultimate in purity while at the same time dealing with the profound and mysterious processes of musical inspiration.
曲目
Poulenc: Chansons fran?§aises for chorus, FP 130
