Gramophone Magazine
October 2020
Editor's Choice

Voces8

Gibbons, O: Drop, drop, slow tears
Pärt: The Deer's Cry
Harris, W: Bring us, O Lord God
Byrd: Ne irascaris Domine
Byrd: Civitas Sancti Tui
Parry: There is an old belief (No. 4 from Songs of Farewell)
Fauré: Pie Jesu (arr. Smith)
Whitacre: A Boy and a Girl
Dove: The three Kings
Stopford: Lully, lulla, lullay
Monteverdi: Lagrime d’amante al sepolcro dell’amata
Bach, J S: Jesu, bleibet meine Freude (from Cantata BWV147 'Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben')
Chesnokov: Spaséñiye, sodélal
Ešenvalds: The Long Road
Mahler: Rückert Lieder: No. 4, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen
Paulus: The Road Home
Bach, J S: Nach dir Herr verlanget mich, BWV 150
Ticheli: Earth Song
Dove: Vertue
Britten: Hymn to St Cecilia, Op. 27
Jansson, M: An Elemental Elegy
Whitacre: Sleep

‘After Silence’, the new self-released double-album from VOCES8, celebrates the power of music and voicing the inexpressible. This unique four-chaptered album, inspired by the British writer Aldous Huxley, marks the ensemble’s 15th anniversary and is a major turning point in release strategies for classical music. ‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music’ - Aldous Huxley.

As communities around the world have united together through the power of singing, this album celebrates the capacity of the human voice to express our innermost feelings.

A quote from Arvo Pärt nestled in the booklet notes sums this up: 'The most sensitive musical instrument is the human soul. The next is the human voice.'

The choral works showcased in this project have been carefully compiled for their thematic power and inexhaustible capacity to express the inexpressible

In the essay from which the title After Silence is taken ‘The Rest is Silence’, Aldous Huxley offers his thoughts on the essential force of music. The most profoundly significant constituents of our being, he says, include our responses to beauty, pleasure, pain, ecstasy and death. These can best be ‘experienced, not expressed’ through silence, and after silence, through music

Huxley’s essay 'The Rest is Silence' from Music at Night and Other Essays (1931), is printed fully within the booklet and is currently not in print elsewhere.

"It’s the breadth – not just of repertoire but of sound, technique and approach – that makes it so arrestingly excellent… The musicianship here is dazzling, and nowhere more so than in Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia…Everything has been captured lovingly but truthfully, allowing us to hear the individual voices behind the group’s signature blend. The result is the best thing Voces8 have done in ages. I can’t wait to hear what comes next." - Gramophone Magazine, October 2020.