The Classics: January 26

''Voice Of The Soul.'' Voices 16 (from Voices NZ Chamber Choir), Horomona Horo (Taonga Puoro). Atoll CD.

Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir was formed in 1998 with Dr Karen Grylls as conductor.

It toured the country in 2011 after taking part in the world choral symposium in Patagonia.

Last year, Atoll recorded most of that programme again in Auckland.

This contains seven items ranging from Hildegard von Bingen's Viridissima Virga, and Benjamin Britten's Five Flower Songs Op.47 to David Hamilton's Karakia of the Stars.

Other NZ works are Helen Fisher's Pounamu and Christopher Marshall's cycle Horizon 1 (Sea and Sky).

At 61 minutes, the programme could have been longer, but the singing is outstanding.

Highlight: ''Passionate music of the senses'' (Grylls).

 


Hosokawa: Orchestral Works 2. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Lyon National Orchestra. Naxos CD.

This second album of works by eminent Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955) features three recent impressionist and attractive items conducted by Jun Markl.

Woven Dreams depicts the journey from womb to birth, played by the Scottish orchestra, which also contributes its chamber group for Blossoming II, continuing the composer's experiments with music as plant-like growth.

The French orchestra plays the composer's earlier nine-part suite Circulating Ocean, which revels in the ''flow and change of water''.

For him, ''the ocean is the birthplace of life, a being possessed of infinite depth and expanse''.

Hosokawa has written fine works on the theme of blossoming plants and is inspired by water's phenomenal continuation in the cyclic changes within nature.

Highlight: intuitive abstraction of nature in sound.

 


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