Carver: The Complete Sacred Choral Music

As the package contsined what I expected I am well pleased

It is very good to have the whole of Carver's surviving music available. He was a fine composer who is best known for his stunning 19-part motet O Bone Jesu but who produced some very good mass settings and other music, too. Alan Tavener and Capella Nova deserve great credit for having recorded this 3-CD series, but I have never been wholly convinced by their performances.Technically, the singing is good and in the larger choral passages the impact can be very moving in places, but especially in quieter passages there is a slight thinness and fragmentation of sound, exacerbated by some slight vibrato and poor balance on occasion which can prevent the polyphony really gelling as it should. I first bought the three-disc set in the mid-90s and, while I'm glad to have it, I haven't played it all that often since - certainly nothing like as much as my discs by The Tallis Scholars, The Cardinall's Musick and others.These certainly aren't bad recordings, but there's something which doesn't quite engage me in the music or engender a sense of spirituality in the way I think it should. If you're interested in polyphony or early Scottish music then you may well be glad of this series, but personally I can only give it a rather qualified recommendation.

Robert Carver n'encombre ni les rayons des disquaires, ni les salles de concerts. Alors, on pardonnera volontiers à cette unique intégrale, assez difficilement trouvable, malheureusement, quelques "pailles" de justesse, des sopranos un peu trop "droites" dans les notes aiguës et le choix d'un chœur important alternant avec des solistes quand d'autres chefs préfèrent du "1 par voix".Près de 35 ans plus tard, il s'agit toujours de la seule version intégrale: mais qu'attendent ces "baroqueux", plus prompts à nous enregistrer des résurrections sans intérêt qu'un maître qui ne mérite pas l'incognito dans lequel on continue de le cantonner?!