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To wonderful songs … [the artists] bring delicacy, grace, an emotion the more poignant for being understated … Not to be missed.
When I was going through a conventionally turbulent adolescence in the peaceful New York suburb of White Plains, little did I know that Percy Grainger also lived there. I suspect that the music teachers in my junior and senior high schools - yes, Virginia, there were still music teachers in those days - were equally unaware or surely we might have been exposed to more than just "Country Gardens...
Here now is the second disc in recent months to bring us face to face with Grainger. His music (or such music as we have in both of these recitals) resembles what I imagine to have been the effect of his physical presence. He opens doors and windows, unleashes sudden bursts of energy, compels a frank response, makes you draw your breath and know you're alive: also, he doesn't stay for long. The...
"The worth of my music will never be guessed or its value to mankind felt, until the approach to it is consciously undertaken as a pilgrimage to sorrows." So wrote Percy Grainger, a composer whose music we normally associate with the dandified frivolity of Handel in the Strand or English Country Gardens.
Stephen Layton and is fine choir Polyphony do Grainger a great service by making this disc...
Collections of the music of Percy Grainger usually emphasize its energy and spriteliness. Not this one. Preceding the first complete recording of his choral settings from Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book" is a "sea shanty" filled with the heartbreak of many of Grainger's miniatures, revealing a depth his reputation as a jolly eccentric might not have suggested.
The suffering that underlies several...
Aprés la belle anthologie de Gardiner (Philips), ce superbe album vient confirmer l’extraordinaire intuition de Grainger pour l'écriture chorale. Il met aussi en lumière une profonde affinité avec Kipling. Une infatigable énergie, la foi dans l'homme (plus particulièrement si c'est un anglo-saxon aux yeux bleus), une même fascination pour le faste verbal, la faculté de concilier la sophistication...