Brian Asawa - Vocalise / Marriner, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields by Brian Asawa Jonathan Tunick

Top40 Music Store are proud to offer the fantastic Brian Asawa - Vocalise / Marriner, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

With so many available right now, it is good to have a make you can trust. The Brian Asawa - Vocalise / Marriner, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields is certainly that and will be a perfect purchase.

For this price, the Brian Asawa - Vocalise / Marriner, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields comes highly respected and is a regular choice with most people. RCA Legacy have added some great touches and this equals great value.

During the planning stages of this project, someone should have thought more seriously about the question, "Why are we doing this?" This collection of "vocalises and newly orchestrated songs" by Fauré, Medtner, Villa-Lobos, and Rachmaninoff, as impressive as it is for its ambition and concept, amounts to a disconcerting mismatch of voice and music. Countertenor Brian Asawa delivers plenty of pretty sounds, but he just doesn't have the emotional range or dramatic tools to make convincing interpretations. Technically, he is nearly flawless, but there's a sameness to every sweetly sung selection. In the famous and oft-performed "Pavane" by Fauré, you're distracted by Asawa's covered, unnatural-sounding quality and his inability to get precisely together with the melody line in the orchestra. This back-of-the-throat sound also gets in the way of clarity in the songs with texts--we can't really hear what these pieces are about. You'll enjoy this recording best if you just focus on the lush sound and skip the awkwardly executed "Suite-Vocalise" by Medtner. --David Vernier