The ecstasies within...
If you love contemporary choral music you will love this album. If you hate contemporary choral music you might love it anyway. Tarik O'Regan is a British composer with Algerian background, born in 1978, and his spare, airy, timeless music for voices and strings joins minimalism with medieval modes and the flowering ecstasies of Tippett's Corelli Fantasia. At its best it's overwhelmingly beautiful and evocative. The recent Triptych is let down by a less-than-transcendent finale, but try The Ecstasies Above or the a capella Threshold of Night, even though in the latter O'Regan seems to miss the poet's point. The performances by Austin, Texas-based Conspirare and are all the composer could wish for in sound if not in diction. (I've collected most of the texts and you can download them from http://www.wnyappeals.com/threshold-of- night-texts.pdf), and the Harmonia Mundi recording, from the fabled Troy Music Hall, though made for SACD, sounds awfully good in stereo, too.
