The Epiphoni Consort

The Epiphoni Consort & Tim Reader – When Love Speaks: Choral Music by Owain Park (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:17:05 minutes | 638 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Delphian Records

The Epiphoni Consort follow up on their acclaimed debut, of music by David Bednall, with a portrait album of another young choral composer on the ascendant.

Owain Park’s musical tracks were set early, when he joined the choir of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol as a boy chorister. Subsequently organ scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, he draws – while still only in his twenties – on a specially English tradition of text-setting and choral writing which links him to figures such as Stanford and Vaughan Williams.

His innate understanding of the medium is shown in the skillfully contrasted weights and colours of Shakespeare Songs of Night-Time, one of two Shakespeare cycles included here, and the Epiphoni Consort singers make the most of the luxuriant chordal writing that characterizes Park’s style as a whole – what his former teacher John Rutter has described as ‘towers of sound’.

The choir is joined by a solo violin for the call and response patterns of Antiphon for the Angels, while Sing to me, windchimes movingly sets loss and yearning alongside poetic images of spring and youth.

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The Epiphoni Consort & Tim Reader – Precious Things: Choral Music by Bernard Hughes (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:45 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 2022 Delphian Records Ltd.

Devoted to Bernard Hughes’s choral music and programmed in close collaboration between the composer and The Epiphoni Consort, this portrait recording reveals a composer for whom musical style grows naturally out of the provenance of his commissions and their chosen texts.

Himself a wordsmith, text setting and delivery are at the forefront of Hughes’s creative thinking, and Epiphoni, making a name for themselves in recordings of music by living British composers, are ideally suited to the delivery of Hughes’s diverse language, in performances that showcase their trademark luxuriant sound.

“Choral music as we rarely hear it – generous, light-footed, surprising. I hope these pieces will be heard more often”.

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