Shakespeare in Song - $16.95

The Phoenix Bach Choir (now known as the Phoenix Chorale) is superb here under Charles Bruffy's direction. Beautiful intonation, clear diction, graceful phrasing -- everything you would expect from a first-class professional chamber choir. Bruffy is an incredible talent! This recording of music set to words by Shakespeare is not the usual olde tyme music, but rather is all from the 20th (and in at least one case, the 21st) century by well-known composers like Vaughan Williams and Frank Martin, and little-knowns like Matthew Harris and Major Alan Murray. All of it is good, some of it strikingly good (like the Martin, the RVW, and Sametz's 'When he shall die,' written in honor of Louis Botto, the late founder of America's most famous professional choir, Chanticleer, and which the choir apparently learned only two days before the recording date.