Two works from the pen of Erik Leidzen, ‘Songs in the Heart’ and ‘Tucker’, both staples of the Salvation Army cornet repertoire provide pillars of tradition supporting works by Bulla, Downie, Whitacre and a nice, bluesy arrangement of ‘Great is thy Faithfulness’ by Eric Alexander. Given his lifelong commitment to the Salvation Army, it comes as no surprise that this second solo CD should present repertoire directly linked to the movement, blending the lyrical with the virtuosic, the sacred with secular combining classics of the genre with newly commissioned works. Returning to the UK, he studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama with Nigel Boddice and Roger Webster, during which time he played with the Co-operative Funeralcare and Kirkintilloch Bands.Īfter two years in Glasgow, Jamie returned to Alsace, continuing his studies with Anthony Plog and as a freelance trumpeter has performed with a number of fine orchestras both in Europe and the United States. After moving to Alsace, France when he was 14, he continued his musical education with Marc Ullrich and Philippe Litzler. Cloudburst deserves every bit of its considerable success.Jamie Hood is recognised in the US and Europe as an educator, conductor and cornet soloist.īorn in Scotland, he is a product of the Salvation Army banding tradition. The sound environment, as usual with Polyphony, is perfectly suited to the music. Polyphony, an English choir with an ear for outstanding American choral music, delivers beautifully shaped lines, clear text articulation, and clean execution of Whitacre's little clusters of tones that resolve themselves into patterns as if an aural kaleidoscope were slowly turning. His work is more rigorous than Rutter's, less mystical than Pärt's, and choral singers and directors who haven't heard Whitacre yet need to make it their business to do so soon. Whitacre's sensitivity to these texts alone raises his music well above the norm, and his instinct for choral writing adds to the interest of these short works. cummings, Octavio Paz (in a mixture of Spanish and English), Federico García Lorca, Edmund Waller, and various contemporary writers. Other works set poems by Emily Dickinson, e.e.

The longest work on the album is a setting of the Bible verse beginning 'When David heard that Absalom was slain.' with much of the duration given to crystalline, shifting, very moving repetition of the words 'my son.' All of the music on this disc is a cappella except for the title track. The music is accessible to any listener, consonant but not really tonal, and driven by close attention to a wide variety of poetic texts, for which Whitacre devises unique forms of declamation. His music is marked by unusual choral effects including, most characteristically, a fleeting, shimmering use of dissonance, with sequences of what might be called micro-resolutions. On his first day in the choir, which he joined because of some pretty girls in the soprano section, they rehearsed the Kyrie from Mozart's Requiem - and, says Whitacre, 'My life was profoundly changed on that day, and I became a choir geek of the highest order.' He began to write choral music that drew on the styles of the man who became his teacher, John Corigliano, and on the minimalist choral works of Arvo Pärt and John Tavener without sounding much like any of them. Eric Whitacre is a fifth-generation Nevadan who couldn't read music when he enrolled at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. This disc was a bestseller straight out of the box, one of a precious few collections of new music by a contemporary composer of which that might be said.

Eric whitaker cloudburst