There isn’t just one, so I’m suggesting a bunch here. The first two come from the English Group Polyphony, with two albums called O magnum misterium (note the middle English spelling) and A Christmas Present from Polyphony. You would never know what a wasteland much of 20th century composing was from listening to these albums. Maybe there is something to the notion that all great music is, at some level, religious music. Certainly, many of the century’s greatest composers–Poulenc, Messianen, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Copland–were deeply religious. That’s as far as I’ll go. This album is mostly British composers, notably Howells, who wrote some great stuff. It doesn’t have the four wonderfully meditative Poulenc Christmas Motets, that we discussed a couple of posts ago, but you can’t have everything. But you can find that on an album called Child of Light by the Elysian Singers, yet another album of 20th century Christmas music by yet another fine English choral group, which also has a very nice version of Britten’s Ceremony of Carols.
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Archive for December 22nd, 2009Christmas music (19)–Best 20th century choral Christmas music albumsPosted on December 22, 2009 by wufnik under Arts & Literature, Music & Popular Culture [ Comments: none ]
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