A suite of German motets, steeped in the music of Heinrich Schutz and the poetry of Martin Opitz; a winsome English partsong, setting Shakespeare's contemporary Edmund Spenser; three angular Italian madrigals intercutting Gramsci with Dante; and an experimental score on a text of Yeats; a thrilling whirlwind of vocal sound, scattering syllables from Wordsworth's Prelude like dead leaves in a Cumbrian gale. Such are the bewilderingly diverse vocal works on this album, EXAUDI's third dedicated to the music of English composer Christopher Fox. Or perhaps Anglo-German composer would be more apposite, since, befitting his dual family heritage, Fox has always looked beyond the often foggy and restrictive horizons of English music towards a wider and more cosmopolitan artistic landscape.
These two ideas, process and found materials, are the key to unlocking the connections between these works. It's often remarked how different Fox's pieces sound from each other on the surface: here we have the lush, ambiguous modality of A Spousal Verse, so very English in its play of false relations; here is the moral rectitude of Schutzian tonality in the powerful Trostlieder; here is the fragmentary, quasi-serialist surface of suo tormento; and so on. The reason the surfaces sound different is that each piece starts with different materials often rich in cultural and historical associations which are then transformed through the application of rigorous compositional processes into something new: a dialogue between composer and the world around him.
