The Recovering Choir Director

When I’m looking for CDs, I usually look for early sacred music or Caribbean dance music (mainly salsa). Last weekend, I was in the Carousel Mall (Syracuse, N.Y.) Borders bookstore and picked up, out of curiosity, a free Naxos 2002 catalog. Having been given a Naxos CD of Bruckner motets as a gift a while back, I was at least familiar with the name. I was in for a treat.

Turns out that Naxos puts out quite a lot of material for a budget price (~$8 US). Particularly noteworthy (for me) is its early music collection and the Renaissance recordings by the Oxford Camerata under the conducting of Jeremy Summerly. For the price of one Tallis Scholars CD, one can buy two solid Oxford Camerata recordings and three times the music (based on playing time). A fair number of their recordings have received glowing reviews from major classical publications.

What’s more, if you subscribe to their website for free, you are granted access to a vast number of their recordings in Windows Media Player format. And, unlike Amazon or other e-tail outfits, you’re given the entire track instead of a snippet.

Hmm. Eight bucks for a CD of timeless, Church-blessed music (and free sheet music via CPDL.org, so in some cases, one can read along) versus eleven bucks for a cassette of today’s greatest from GIA (sheet music extra).