The music of Richard Pantcheff has been somewhat neglected, perhaps because he was working in South Africa when English cathedral music really hit its new golden age in the 2010s. Too, his music is more demanding than that of Rutter and his ilk, with close attention to the text and flexible treatment of tonality according to the demands of an individual work. Pantcheff studied with Benjamin Britten as a young man, and there are strong echoes of Britten in the choral music here; try Britten's Flower Songs, Op. 47, for an idea of the mixture of the weighty and the lyrical in Pantcheff's music. Michael Tippett might be another influence. The Pantcheff works here are a cappella or accompanied by piano or organ. They are both sacred and secular, without a strong stylistic differentiation between them, and this is key to the uniqueness of Pantcheff's style: it has a slightly mystical tinge. Listen to the Four Poems of Stephen Crane, Op. 86, secular works much newer than the rest of the works on the album, but stylistically of a piece with them, for an idea of the seriousness of purpose in Pantcheff's music. The clean and committed performances of the London Choral Sinfonia under Michael Waldron add much to the satisfying effect, as does the flattering sound from St. Mark's Church, Regents Park, London. The music here was recorded in 2015; kudos to Orchid Classics for finally making it available.
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