Angelic Voices

If I had studied music instead of art I would have a better musical vocabulary and I could express myself in ways that are more accurately descriptive than to just say that something is ‘beautiful’. That usually doesn’t fully explain the feeling I get from a piece of music.

But there is a line that I walk between using the same adjectives so often that they become boring and using adjectives that sound too pretentious, or at least pretentious for me. I pulled up the old thesaurus the other day and started looking for new superlatives to spice up my writing.

I like words like rich, classy, quiet, fresh, crisp, hearty, and so fourth, but maybe I should try words like scintillating, arresting, resplendent, dazzling or sparkling.

With that in mind I’ll try and describe a CD by that vivacious group of boys, The Vienna Boy’s Choir. This CD is appropriately, if unimaginatively, titled Angelic Voices, the Best of the Vienna Boy’s Choir. What I like best about this CD is the mixture of classical, folk and pop songs. It starts off with that euphonic Bach number 'Jesus Bleibet Meine Freude'. The violins are dynamic and the voices are alluring.
WSK, as always, gives us a very mellifluous version of Mozart’s ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ and they are renown for Handel’s ‘Hallelujah‘.
The soloist on Mendelssohn’s ‘O, For the Wings of a Dove‘, sings the German version and his young, piping voice is ambrosial. It’s the only German version I have heard.
There are well known songs by Handel, Strauss and Mozart, all performed with an effervescent ease. ‘Zadok’ the Priest is especially sonorous.

They follow the classical with songs like ‘Scarborough Fair‘, ‘Shenandoah‘, ‘La Guantanamera’ and ‘Loch Lomand‘, all of which are (get ready) pulchritudinous.

All joking aside, I really do listen to this one a lot. 'Loch Lomond' is one of my favs.