Composer: SHEPPARD; LASSUS; HANDL; MUNDY; BYRD; RHEINBERGER; BOURGEOIS; TALLIS; VICTORIA; GUERRERO; RACHMANINOV

Information:
The latest from The Canbridge Singers and John Rutter. Music for the close of day, including a second CD with the Office of Compline.
A "10-10" Review from ClassicsToday.com reads as follows:
Back in the late-1980s, John Rutter and his Cambridge Singers made an interesting CD for the eclectic American Gramaphone label titled Brother Sun, Sister Moon. The second half of the program concerned "Music of the Evening Rite", exactly the same theme Rutter and his group explore here, performing several of the same works, but also filling out the concept with more music--and concluding with a second CD devoted to a celebration of the Roman (and later Anglican) evening worship service known as Compline. Typical of Rutter's recordings, this one offers a carefully organized, logically flowing program of stylistically and thematically complementary works, beginning and ending with beautiful motets by John Sheppard, the first of which, In pace, also appeared on the earlier disc. Renaissance composers Sheppard, Byrd, and Victoria are most represented, but from later centuries we also hear Josef Rheinberger's lovely Abendlied and Rachmaninov's oft-performed Bogoroditsye Dyevo (Ave Maria), this last sounding curiously light-textured, more like an English partsong than a serious, bass-rich Slavic prayer. The second disc will be a curiosity for most listeners, but for Anglican/Episcopal church-goers the structure and unison English chants encompassing Responses, Psalms, Lessons, and recitation of the Apostles' Creed will be very familiar. It may not be the most compelling programming for a commercial CD, but the inclusion of this service, with its lovely, prayerful, humble simplicity makes sense in this context--and placing it on a separate disc gives it both a proper liturgical distinction and a logical place apart from the strictly musical program. And if you've been a long-time Cambridge Singers fan, it won't surprise you to know that, although the singers may have changed over the last couple of decades, Rutter's choir is excellent as ever, and the sound, from the group's ideal and favored venue--the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral--can't be better--David Vernier