This is an excellent introduction to the piano music of two of the 20th century's greatest composers. Gyorgy Ligeti's stock has only risen since his death, and much of his repulation rests on his formidable ETUDES, one of the few recently composed piano works to enter the active repertory of contemporary players. Ligeti doesn't have a method and belongs to no particular movement or school; he creatively exploited the vocabulary of postwar classical music to hone a very particular voice of his own--expressive, humorous, vivid, grotesque, sometimes macabre.
Like Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen was liberated by the harmonic freedom of modern music to forge a highly personal, even eccentric path--in his case to express and celebrate the awesome presence of God in nature. (He is perhaps the most traditionally Roman Catholic of any major composer, although that is just about the only conservative thing about him.) Far from serene, his music bursts with color and dissonance, and can be violent and terrifying in nature. The piano cycle VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT-JESUS is quintessential Messaien, and the pianist Volker Banfield gives these excerpts a fluent reading with plenty of splash.

Richard Marlow's Trinity College Choir of Cambridge has established itself as one of the premier groups of its kind, recording prolifically for Conifer and staking out a swath of repertorial turf that encompasses devotional music from the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Unlike their better-known counterparts at King's College, the Trinity choristers are an all adult ensemble, using women instead of boy trebles and achieving a more professional sound as a result.
CHORAL MOODS is a well-filled two-disk compilation which offers an excellent survey of sacred choral music, though one might have hoped for a little more J. S. Bach. What is here, above all, is beautiful music, well sung and recorded. There are some substantial pieces, such as the Gregorio Allegri "Miserere," Felix Mendelssohn's anthem "Hear My Prayer" and the complete "Messe Basse" (Low Mass) of Gabriel Fauré, as well as some less frequently encountered works such as Henry Balfour Gardiner's "Evening Hymn" and Camille Saint-Saëns "O Salutaris Hostia." It adds up to make a highly commendable anthology.