St Paul's Cathedral | Swayne Magnificat | 2015 скачать в хорошем качестве

St Paul's Cathedral | Swayne Magnificat | 2015

My Magnificat was written in 1982 in response to a commission from Christ Church College, Oxford, whose choir first performed it under their conductor Francis Grier in July of that year. At that time I was still reeling from the impact of my belated discovery of African music. In the previous year I had spent two months in Senegal and the Gambia, researching and making recordings of the music of the Jola people of that region. One of the songs I collected during this trip was a work-song which I recorded in a small village called Badem Karantaba, about thirty miles south-east of Ziguinchor in the Casamance region of southern Senegal. I used the opening call of this song to begin the Magnificat; it returns as a refrain towards the end. © GS The Magnificat was commissioned by Francis Grier for the choir of Christchurch, Oxford, in 1982 with funds provided by the Southern Arts Association. It is a unique setting of very familiar words and has become a classic work in the choral catalogue. The Magnificat canticle forms a central part of both Vespers and the Anglican office of Evensong and this setting for double choir in Latin delights in the daringly unconventional interpolation of zulu warrior chant interwoven between ‘Stravinskian’ ostinati-dominated polyphony. Swayne’s distanced approach to specific textual nuance shares a similarity with the great Magnificat settings of the sixteenth century (Victoria, Palestrina, Vivanco, Ortiz, etc.), but the pointillist dabs of colour, the ostinati and increasingly wide-leaping lines place this very firmly in its contemporary milieu - Jeremy Filsell © 2003 Live performance by Choir of St Paul's Cathedral. Conducted by Andrew Carwood with Simon Johnson on the organ.