choral music
Christopher Lambton
From the outset, it was clear that this would be a performance of immaculate sonic architecture. Over a soft, deep, and breathy organ pedal the first utterings of the strings sounded tentative, almost improvised, like an artist making the first daubs on a vast empty canvas.Likewise the chorus entry on "Selig sind", at the same time both hesitant and mysterious, yet perfectly controlled. In keeping with his reputation, there was no doubt that conductor Maxim Emelyanychev knew exactly what he wished to achieve with this performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
Tenebrae in tenebris: put more plainly, a top choir that’s anything but shadowy, except when it needs to be, doing its bit for the darkness of Maundy Thursday. The thoughtful plaiting of Bach motets with three Tenebrae Responsories and other works by our top choral composer, James MacMillan, worked well until the last work on the programme. Then they had to go and spoil it all by premature ejaculation.Personal context: as an agnostic, I value this stage in Easter week as a time for meditation on suffering, compassion and death, never more needed than now. Two year ago, when concert halls were Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Facade Ensemble is an interesting chamber group of young players dedicated to exploring 20th repertoire, in this case John Cage, Arvo Pärt and Gavin Bryars, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year. The programme, put together by founder and conductor Benedict Collins Rice was contemplative in tone, and an interesting opportunity to hear these experimental and minimal works in a pared-down scoring.I had not come across John Cage as a choral composer until this year, when I reviewed the Latvian Radio Choir’s disc for theartsdesk. It is, unsurprisingly, not like most other choral music – Read more ...
graham.rickson
GoldMund, Anna Veit: Mehr Oder Weniger Lametta – arrangements of Tchaikovsky, Bach, Humperdinck, Martin Luther, John Rutter (Solo Musica)What works best here are the classy, and occasionally witty and wacky brass arrangements, plus some very fine brass and percussion playing indeed from a group of top players from the Munich Philharmonic, above all their fabulous Portuguese-born principal tuba, Ricardo Carvalhoso. Some of this album needs to be filed under "you probably have to be Bavarian", and with no translations in the brochure, a lot does go missing. "Lametta" in the album title is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are conductors, and then again there are choral conductors. I sang under David Willcocks in Tallis’s 40-part "Spem in alium" and remember vividly that long-armed semaphoring that he later applied so notably with the Bach Choir.Sofi Jeannin, choral conductor par excellence (of, among others, the BBC Singers), is likewise a semaphorer, not always comfortable to watch, effective if not outstandingly individual in the outcome. In this typically hybrid BBC National Orchestra of Wales concert she conducted three tricky choral works with the dependable BBC National Chorus of Wales, and, Read more ...
David Nice
David Hill, long-term driving force of the Bach Choir which Vaughan Williams sang in for 18 years before becoming its music director in 1921, claims VW as “a quintessentially English composer”.That was rather less the case in Thursday night's choice of works gilded by the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall. The Overture to The Wasps is influenced by French and Russian examples, the early Swinburne setting The Garden of Proserpine offers a kind of late-romantic lingua franca, and, sea shanties apart, A Sea Symphony unfurls what its chosen genius Walt Whitman calls “a pennant universal”. Read more ...
David Nice
Schoenberg’s “Song of the Wood Dove” takes up a mere 11 of the 100 minutes of his epic Gurrelieder, though it’s a crucial narrative of how King Waldemar of Gurre’s beloved Tove was murdered by his jealous queen. Last night, as in Simon Rattle’s 2017 Proms performance, stunning mezzo Karen Cargill came on stage, immediately in character, and with no reference to the score on the stand in front of her, showed everyone else how to do it.At that point temperatures finally rose. They were to do so again, fitfully, in the rest of the work, where God-challenging, undead Waldemar leads his vassals in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Voces8 Live from London, now in its seventh iteration, has progressed from streaming choral chamber music from an empty studio to an 80-strong visiting choir in a packed Christ Church, Spitalfields. In doing this the festival has retained its best features – a variety of repertoire, collaboration with a range of ensembles – while adding scale and the warmth of a live audience.The final concert of the current series of ten saw TUKS Camerata (pictured below), a student choir from the University of Pretoria, singing both alone and alongside Voces8 themselves, in a programme called “Hope” Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Once upon a time the Three Choirs Festival conjured up a single image, that of the English Oratorio – the grand choral solemnification of everything that was most profound in Anglican thought (though ironically its greatest exemplar, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, was irretrievably Catholic, and one Anglican bishop is supposed to have said he wouldn’t allow it into his cathedral). Today the festival’s image is more diverse, but it still sometimes hankers after the good old days, with their smug serenities and flowing pieties, and this revival of George Dyson’s 100-minute long Quo vadis, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Amid the warm familiarity of a programme of established Vaughan Williams favourites, presented at the Barbican by the RPO and the City of London Choir, what really drew me in was the chance to hear his Fantasia on the “Old 104th” Psalm Tune, performed at the Proms in 1950 and apparently not heard again in London since.The piece, seemingly modelled on Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, pits choir and orchestra against solo piano in a set of variations on a 17th century hymn tune. Unfortunately it turns out there is a good reason it hasn’t been heard for more than 70 years: it's a bit of a dud.This Read more ...
peter.quinn
After watching so many gigs through a computer screen, it was a joy to hear live music again in familiar haunts – from Ronnie Scott’s and the Southbank to Grand Junction, Paddington – in 2021. It made you appreciate anew not only the high-wire artistry and unfolding musical conversations happening on stage, but also the collective thrill of that shared "in the room" experience.No album more aptly epitomised that sense of musical communication, risk-taking and acute listening than pianist Eliane Elias’s Mirror Mirror, which featured Elias in alternating duets with Chucho Valdés and the late Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Praetorius: Es is ein Ros Dresdner Kammerchor/Hans-Christoph Rademann (Accentus)Oliver Geisler’s witty booklet note makes the case for Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) as “one of the best unknowns in the history of music.” Reading the composer’s biography makes one wonder how he found the time to compose at all, and the seasonal choral pieces collected here are notable for their emotional immediacy and technical flair. The title track, “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen”, the closest thing to a Praetorious greatest hit, is beautifully sung here by Hans-Christoph Rademann’s ten-piece Read more ...