Heavenly Voices

Its cover proclaims that this video is "an extraordinary musical journey through 1000 years of Christian music, filmed in ruined abbeys, glorious countryside, grand cathedrals, beautiful gardens, and lofty churches." Quite an ambitious project for two hours time, you might think, before reading on the video's back cover that its topic is actually British choral tradition, rather than the whole of Christian music. Thus winnowed, host Barry Rose attempts to explore the great traditions of church music via interviews and musical performance, beginning with tenth-century plainchant and ending with the Contemporary Christian Music of the late twentieth century. Most survey-type videos have hard rows to hoe, given their time constraints and breadth of topics, and I think Rose has decided that, rather than inundate us with too many facts, he will instead avoid too many facts about this topic. We are subjected to endless discussions of "how the music of my youth affected my life" and equally lengthy musical numbers, which certainly have their place in a music video. But given 15 minutes to discuss the contributions of the Renaissance to church music, eight of those precious minutes should probably not be spent on performance of a single piece. And because the tape's focus is exclusively British, the contributions of Bach to choral music are not mentioned, but then, neither are those of Vaughn Williams or William Walton. And as far as those "grand cathedrals and lofty churches," they may well have been, but who could tell, given the dark shadows and washed out photography? Presented in eight 15-minute segments, this tape is a disappointing hodgepodge of recollections that made me crave the talking-head format, during which I may have learned just a little bit more about this topic. Not recommended. (K. Glaser)