COMPOSERS: Corigliano,Gorecki,Hovhaness,Part,Vasks & Kancheli
LABELS: Telarc
ALBUM TITLE: Collection: I Fiamminghi
WORKS: Works by Hovhaness, Pärt, Corigliano, Górecki, Vasks & Kancheli
PERFORMER: I Fiamminghi/Rudolf Werthen
CATALOGUE NO: CD-89111 Reissue
There seems less point in the reissue of five predominantly slow ‘holy minimalist’ offerings, plus one neo-Romantic American one, than, say, in a CD consisting of the different versions of Pärt’s Fratres. With the latter you can make meaningful comparisons and discover surprising and illuminating diversity. The back-to-back, back-to-basics collection on the present Telarc disc, however, has a whiff of the supermarket about it: a six-pack for the minimally challenged.
The excellent Belgian chamber orchestra I Fiamminghi has already released a Fratres-Fest. Its version of the strings-and-percussion Fratres reissued here is as commendably accurate and atmospheric as the orchestra’s accounts of Hovhaness’s Prayer of St Gregory, Corigliano’s early Elegy, Górecki’s Three Pieces in Old Style, Vasks’s Musica dolorosa (both of these last two several times recorded), and a single movement from Kancheli’s Mourned by the Wind; the Vasks and Kancheli I’ve reviewed here only recently. While one presumably doesn’t buy a disc like this expecting variety, the cosmic Kancheli erupts with effective finality after Vasks’s sometimes rugged ruminations; Corigliano sounds brazenly American in such a context. Low marks for the scanty documentation. Keith Potter