Christopher Fox: Trostlieder

A suite of German motets, steeped in the music of Heinrich Schütz and the poetry of Martin Opitz; a winsome English partsong, setting Shakespeare’s contemporary Edmund Spenser; three angular Italian madrigals intercutting Gramsci with Dante; 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.