Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.
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The piece is divided into two contrasting halves. The first concerns the notion of a text adorned by layers of intricate filigree. Just as many of Hering’s pages begin with an enlarged, highly ornamented single letter, the music opens with detailed decorative figuration, and from this texture, melodic fragments gradually begin to emerge until they coalesce into a clear melodic line, which becomes the musical focus, or the ‘text’, if you will.
In the second half, the gradual transformation of a very straightforward rendering of the alphabet into extremely ornate, and eventually purely abstract designs in Hering’s manuscript was the inspiration. Musically, this manifests itself as a simple line in the strings that repeats and evolves, but is gradually joined by other melodic figures in the woodwinds placed in counterpoint against it, leading to a densely multilayered climax of activity, followed by a brief coda.
from notes by Matthew Kaner © 2016