Luminescence Chamber Singers & Roland Peelman - Of the Body (2025) Hi-Res

Luminescence Chamber Singers presents a beautiful, intriguing and profoundly moving collection of vocal works that offer fascinating new perspectives on parts of our bodies that we take for granted.

Honed over thousands of years, the human body is an extraordinary feat of engineering and design. Human understanding of its mysteries has evolved at breathtaking speed in recent years, but that journey began in 1543 with the groundbreaking anatomy treatise of the Dutch physician Andreas Vesalius, full of lavish, brilliantly detailed drawings of the hidden depths of the body, as revealed to the naked, public eye through the new and scandalous practice of dissection.

Of the Body travels that journey in music, from madrigals of Vesalius’ time, when the same spirit of adventure and discovery was also freeing vocal music, to the present day, when the very concept of being in a body is being challenged by new digital universes. At the heart of this exquisite album is the world premiere recording of a landmark song cycle by Australian composer Dan Walker, tracing the body from eyes, hands, feet, mouth and blood to the heart. The work is, he says, ‘something of a celebration of the human body: anatomically, metaphorically, spiritually and sexually.