Exaudi Vocal Ensemble - Michael Finnissy: Vocal Works 1974-2015

This album brings together four of the most virtuosic and spectacular works ever written for vocal ensemble. Spanning four decades of Michael Finnissy's career: EXAUDI's programme presents two works from the mid-1970s, Cipriano and Tom Fool's Wooing, in which extreme vocal gymnastics are given an urgently erotic charge. Kelir (1981) is a powerful vocal tableau of Xenakis-like intensity, made from the syllables of Javanese ritual formulae. The more recent Gesualdo: Libro Sesto (2012-13) engages with the tortured madrigalism of the Italian master, presenting what Finnissy describes as 'fantasies...about music, about love and death, about the voice.'