Those interested in choral music in crossover styles will find a distinctive take on that new tradition here. Ola Gjeilo: Winter Songs Decca A rising composer’s debut release on a major label, Gjeilo’s album on Decca is an important release of heavenly, bewitching, eternal new choral music for our time. The performances by the top-notch choirs Tenebrae and Voces8 are superb. The utter simplicity of Gjeilo's music here matches the words, but there is nothing derivative about either of them. Perhaps the most effective piece here, and a place to start sampling, is Tundra (track nine), a setting of a text by Charles Anthony Silvestri depicting a slice of Norwegian landscape. Gjeilo's music is economical and not pompous in the least. How you feel about these models may determine your reaction to Gjeilo, but there's no doubt that he welds these semi-popular styles together skillfully: a piece may begin with a pop piano introduction (played by Gjeilo himself) and then recede to choral melodic material in a chantlike vein.
Other pieces lean more toward Philip Glass, and yet others toward a cappella music in John Rutter's more artless vein. (New York is probably not a top market for the genre), but the sacred pieces here contain passages that evoke the so-called praise & worship music within that genre, with light choral polyphony over a backdrop of piano and/or strings.
It's not clear how much contemporary Christian music he might have absorbed while in the U.S. The young Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo (say YAY-lo) studied at the Juilliard School and has lived in New York and Italy.
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