Music, Music, up to the Last Minute

There is such an abundance of free music online these days, from Pandora.com, a site where you can create up to 100 channels of music that plays your favorite composers or styles, to the radio broadcasts of most of the world, it seems (I like exploring world music from the iTunes radio list, as well as wnyc.org, and other public radio stations around the country that offer shows not available in our listening area) to the millions of clips of live and recorded performances on YouTube. It hardly seems necessary to buy anything anymore. But that would be unseasonal, so here are some suggestions for sounds to serenade you into the New Year.

   The Esoterics, an ensemble I heard recently in Seattle, is devoted to
20th-century a capella choral music.

   Though the group sometimes delves into works of the past, their founder and conductor, Eric Banks, himself a composer, seeks out new material and performs it with his  group of 24-36 young semi-professionals with a keen sense of devotion to the sound and meaning of the texts, most of which are spiritual in content. At a Seattle concert I took in the intricate harmonies of the ferociously difficult “Deutsche Motette†of Richard Strauss and the Concerto by Alfred Schnittke. So at intermission I ran to the back and bought half a dozen of their recordings.

   The discs include songs by  well-known American composers like Irving
Fine, Elliott Carter,  and Stephen Paulus, as well as Banks himself, and younger composers. The Esoterics have 10 CDs in all, many of them available on cdbaby.com or iTunes ($10). It’s hard to choose among them for their beauty and an often hypnotic, lulling quality, but I have particularly enjoyed “Beata,†a 1997 release with 22 songs on primarily Latin texts like the Ave Maria and Magnificat.   Another disc, “Mandala,†offers texts from the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, Lao-tzu, and other Asian and Indian spiritual writing, set by eight composers.

   I have not succumbed to an iPhone, and do relatively little purchasing
of songs online, but if you have iTunes on your computer or other electronic gizmo, you can find everything from Garrick Ohlsson’s complete Chopin set ($159) to all the latest recordings by the New York Philharmonic under Alan Gilbert. ($150).

   For some lovely Christmas music, try “A Christmas Choral Spectacularâ€
by Peter Breiner on the Naxos label. Single works and movements bring
prices down to the $.99 range, making for infinite choices to fill stockings up to the last stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve.

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