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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning! : You've GOT to Hear This in SACD, 2 Mar 2005
As a Kansas Citian, I've had many years experience hearing Charles Bruffy work his magic with choral singers; his home church is a quarter-mile from my home and even his small amateur church choir is wonderful. The Kansas City Chorale, his first professional choir, has made memorable recordings for Nimbus. And now his Phoenix Bach Choir is recording for Chandos. As a recent article by James Reel in Fanfare puts it, Bruffy 'is one of the next big things in American choral music. He's mentioned in the same breath with his former mentor, Robert Shaw.' Possibly my most memorable choral music experience was several years ago when Bruffy combined the Kansas City and Phoenix choirs to sing Thomas Tallis's legendary 'Spem in alium,' with 40+ singers ranged around the periphery of an oval cathedral space with the audience in the middle. Waves of polyphony came crashing over the audience from different directions like musical tidal waves. Extraordinary! This recording of music set to words by Shakespeare is not the usual olde tyme music, but rather is all from the 20th (and in at least one case, the 21st) century by well-known composers like Vaughan Williams and Frank Martin, and little-knowns like Matthew Harris and Major Alan Murray. All of it is good, some of it strikingly good (like the Martin, the RVW, and Sametz's 'When he shall die,' written in honor of Louis Botto, the late founder of America's most famous professional choir, Chanticleer, and which the choir apparently learned only two days before the recording date!) Others have already written in some detail about the program. Let me just add that unless you hear this in SACD you're missing something. I have heard it in both formats and can tell you that the SACD is sensational, not that the plain-vanilla CD lacks anything for that medium. As Bruffy predicts in the Fanfare article, 'Once you listen on SACD you'll never go back.' This is stunningly beautiful release that I recommend unstintingly. On my wish-list is a recording in SACD of the Phoenix Bach Choir and the Kansas City Chorale reunited to sing 'Spem in alium.' Now THAT would really be something heard in surround sound the way Tallis intended it! TT=55:52 Scott Morrison
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