New York Polyphony are a quartet of singers; Geoffrey Williams – counter-tenor, Steven Caldicott Wilson and Andrew Fuchs – tenors and Craig Phillips – bass. On Sky of My Heart they mostly sing unaccompanied but are joined by the LeStrange Viols (Loren Ludwig and John Mark Rozendaal – treble viol, Kivie Cahn-Lipman – tenor viol, Zoe Weiss and Douglas Kelley – bass viol).
The album is a mix of Renaissance and contemporary pieces; most of the latter composed for NYP. They are very good singers with terrific control and a very clean largely vibrato free sound that works well for most of the music on the disk. Some of the material is religious; William Byrd’s setting of Ecce quam bonum, Becky McGlade’s setting of Prudentius’ Of the Father’s Love Begotten and Ivan Moody’s settings of three excerpts from the Song of Songs. All of these are unaccompanied in a churchy sort of style. Continue reading
Not so long ago if one wanted to do interesting electronic music things one needed a studio full of enormously expensive equipment, access to which was likely restricted to a fortunate few. Now with a few relatively inexpensive mikes, a laptop and some speakers one can create all kinds of cool stuff and perform it in almost any venue. The recording ‘m going to talk about here was made a few years ago but it’s good and pretty typical of what I’m talking about.
operaramblings 