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Silence & Music
Benjamin Britten - Ralph Vaughan Williams - Edward Elgar - Percy Grainger - Charles Villiers Stanford - Herbert Howells - Peter Warlock - Jonathan Dove

Silence & Music

Gabrieli Consort

Label: Signum Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0635212049020
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Catalog number: SIGCD 490
Releasedate: 06-10-17
- New disc from Gabrieli Consort – following several award winning recordings.

- This programme explores that vast twentieth-century secular English choral repertoire which goes under the generic title ‘partsongs’

This programme explores that vast twentieth-century secular English choral repertoire which goes under the generic title ‘partsongs’. It is an extraordinarily rich repertoire to which almost all the famous composers contributed. Buried amongst vast quantities of slightly twee pastoralism – the much-derided “cow-pat” school – are to be found many settings of glorious poetry, forming a corpus of sublime twentieth-century madrigals at least as fine as their famous renaissance forebears. However, this programme has another particular theme: how poets and composers reflect upon the natural world as a metaphor for our own emotional experience. At the heart of this programme is the complex relationship between man and nature, the bitter-sweetness of a radiant and beautiful dawn creating the same unbearable sadness of a ravishing song, and both with intimations of mortality.