All Music Guide named Conspirare, Miró Quartet, and Craig Hella Johnson’s GRAMMY® Nominated House of Belonging recording a Featured New Release for the week of November 10!
“The group reliably delivers an ethereal sound with spiritual overtones generated in part by a nice church acoustic… Conspirare and its director, Craig Hella Johnson, achieve a musical variety that perhaps exceeds anything they’ve done previously. There are plenty of sunny tunes like [Shara] Nova’s I Have Never Loved Someone and Joy by Margaret Bonds, but other works are more unconventional. Sample Michael Schachter’s O Vorsehung, which weaves text from Beethoven’s despairing Heiligenstadt Testament with the slow movement of his String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, subtitled “Prayer of One Recovering to the Godhead.” That is one of a group of pieces where the choir is joined by the Miró Quartet in a balance elegantly handled by Johnson. Moira Smiley’s “Haiku” is another work with unusual textual content, and this one shows that Johnson’s way of having his soloist seem to emerge organically from the texture is undimmed. A wonderful choral release.”
—James Manheim, AllMusic
See the full review on AllMusic.com
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