SKU: HL.14042246

ISBN 9781780382227. UPC: 884088922061. 6.5x9.75x0.045 inches.

This setting of the opening to Psalm 102 was composed in the early 1680s. Purcell, who was in his early twenties, had succeeded John Blow as organist of Westminster Abbey around the beginning of the decade and his star was in the ascendant as a court composer.

In this piece he pulls off a remarkable compositional coup: a single, gradual climax, lasting over two minutes and culminating on the final repetition of the word 'come', is achieved through a sublime, freely developing eight-part weave of the opening material. The harmonies that result from the chromatic inflections on the word 'crying' all serve the mounting tension in this extraordinary miniature.

Studyof the autograph manuscript suggest that this anthem was intended to be the opening part of a larger work which was never completed.

SKU: BT.MUSM570367917

Thomas Simaku's  La Leggiadra Luna  arranged for choir a capella. The music begins with a song-like expression introduced at a slow pace, as if emerging from the remoteness of time itself. It is clearly based on the musical utterance of the 'white modality', but these modal segments are constantly surrounded by chromatic inflections throughout the work. Each section of the choir pursues its own path, but during a compositional process of ‘zooming in and out’, as it were, their individual qualities are highlighted. It is as if the initial sound object - which to begin with was far away- is brought nearer to us, in time and space. A variety of shortsegments, predominantly modal, but stemming from different chromatic ‘locations’, are often superimposed. The task of filtering out this 'amourphous' texture and giving its constituent elements - be they melodic or harmonic, or a combination of both - a renewed identity, becomes an essential compositional aim, through which the process of crystallization occurs. The main strategy of the piece is thus exploring the interrelationship between these two sound-worlds (modal and chromatic) and their temporal qualities (ancient and modern), musical or otherwise.