Secular Choral Music

At times Romantic, at other times with a jazzy touch, the Choral collection Bruckner. Secular choral music is full of exciting discoveries and new arrangements at various levels of difficulty. Anton Bruckner’s secular choral music is often overshadowed by his great symphonies and sacred choral works – unfairly, as choral experts Simon Halsey and Jan Schumacher prove with their small but fine selection of choral music inspired by secular texts.

Bruckner left only a few movements for mixed choir; instead, his music for male voices constitutes a far larger body of work. For this collection, renowned arrangers from Germany, England, Denmark, and Italy have specially reworked the most beautiful of these choral movements for SATB, enabling this great repertoire to be performed by mixed choirs. Two original SATB compositions are also included. Furthermore, the choral collection features arrangements of songs originally written for solo voice and piano with texts by such poets as Heinrich Heine and Emanuel Geibel. Another highlight is an arrangement of the Adagio from Bruckner’s String Quintet WAB 112, which Heribert Breuer has created for choir to a text by Georg Trakl.