choral music
Rachel Halliburton
“My goal was to take the Messiah as if it had been written yesterday,” the conductor and eminent French harpsichordist Christophe Rousset told Tom Service on Radio 3 on Saturday. “[It would be] as if we had received the score for the first time… [and were thinking] wow, how amazing this piece is and how fresh it can be.”“Wow” was certainly a word that came to mind as the English Baroque Soloists launched into the Messiah’s French-style overture with nimble ebullience, emphasising the beats in bold stripes of tonal colour. It was as if Rousset, one of our most stylish and subversive Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There is, of course, a long tradition in this country of Christmas Messiah performances – but it’s not one I’ve ever previously participated in. This was the first time I’ve ever heard Messiah live, despite being quite long in the tooth – and it was terrific. I can see what I’ve been missing out on all these years. Handel really knew what he was doing – as do the Philharmonia Chorus, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and four excellent soloists, all under the leadership of Eamonn Dougan.I am no expert on the scholarship behind performance practice of Messiah, although the piece is Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
It seldom happens that you long to hear choral music not in a modern auditorium but some chilly, echoing cavern of a great Victorian town hall. But that thought did arise as a full-strength London Symphony Orchestra and its hundred-strong chorus crammed uncomfortably into every inch of the Barbican hall’s stage for Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem. It felt like squeezing a herd of elephants into a cake tin, and the Barbican’s disobliging acoustic hardly helped enrich the mood. Yet Antonio Pappano still managed to work the uplifting magic that he reliably brings to choral blockbusters Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Mozart’s unfinished C Minor mass lacks a canonical completion of the sort that Süssmayr so famously – and still contentiously – imposed on the Requiem. Even without its Agnus Dei and chunks of the Credo, however, the showpiece mass planned for the Salzburg abbey in 1783 remains a mighty and stirring piece whose choral and solo peaks more than match the later work. At St Martin’s, David Bates, his group La Nuova Musica, and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, brought to it not just passages of period-sensitive refinement but a full-bodied, big-boned weight and depth of sound.
With almost 30 Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This powerful, austere collaboration between Les Arts Florissants and the Amala Dianor Company – presented as part of Dance Umbrella – excavated all the violence, grief and transcendence of the events surrounding Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion.Gesualdo published his tortured, piercingly beautiful Tenebrae Responsories in 1611, 21 years after he murdered his first wife and her lover, imbuing the music with the anguish and contradictory emotions of a man who many believe was seeking redemption through his art.Perhaps it’s not surprising then that betrayal with a kiss dominated the first “ Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Echo Vocal Ensemble have their genesis in Genesis. Sarah Latto’s group were initially formed by a cohort of the Genesis Sixteen young artists’ programme – and she has turned them into one of the most innovative vocal groups around. The programme at Union Chapel on Sunday night was a good example of their approach, with eclectic repertoire, new commissions, improvisation, a smattering of classics – and a loose-limbed dancer adding a visual element.The conceit of the programme was the progression from dusk to night. We started at 6pm, to catch the last light of the day, and ending with the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Powerful, Timeless, Inspiring” it says on the front cover of the programme-book for this year’s supposedly 297th Three Choirs Festival at Hereford. So please leave your frivolity at the cathedral door with your gun and your mobile phone.Richard Blackford has certainly taken the hint with his new cantata, The Black Lake, a studiously tearful, elevated distillation of Caradog Prichard’s One Moonlit Night, a coming-of-age novel about a Welsh boy born and brought up in the slate-quarrying village of Bethesda in north Wales just before and during the First World War. It’s a curious thing about Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Arvo Pärt was into his 40s before he made had his Big Musical Idea: simplicity. He has spent the subsequent half-century pursuing this ideal, largely through the religious choral music that has been dubbed Holy Minimalism. And in this year of his 90th birthday, the Proms gave the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir a late-night concert to celebrate this music – and the people turned out, in what was the best-attended late-nighter I can remember.The programme consisted of eight (plus an encore) small pieces by Pärt, alongside other pieces in similar vein, and one very much not. What was Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Eva Quartet are four outstanding Bulgarian voices of polyphonic purity and depth, drawn from the legendary choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, who guested on Kate Bush’s classic Eighties album The Sensual World.Soprano Gergana Dimitrova, mezzo-soprano Sofia Yaneva, alto Evelina Christova and contralto Daniela Stoitchkova began performing as a quartet in 1995, and are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year with this, their first concert in the UK since 2008’s Balkan Fever festival, at St Cyprian’s, a High Gothic revival church between Baker Street and Regent’s Park.They perform in full Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There was a wonderful festal spirit at the Wigmore Hall last night, as the vocal ensemble Stile Antico ran through a Greatest Hits selection in celebration of their 20th anniversary, in front of a packed and enthusiastic audience. The 12-strong group still boasts four founder members, but this was swelled to 10 for the final item, as a swarm of alumni joined in a beautiful rendition of Gibbons’ The Silver Swan.Stile Antico specialises in music of the 16th century, in all its variety – from Byrd to Palestrina – sung with rich-hued warmth in the vocal sound, animation and vigour in the rhythms Read more ...
David Nice
Never make your mind up too soon about any large-scale work by a genius. Back in 2010, I had my doubts about James MacMillan’s first Passion, hearing in the impact of Colin Davis’s Barbican performance a halfway house between the composer's shattering best and his more contrived side.This time everything combined to convince: a more generous acoustic, professional voices as collective narrator (Chamber Choir Ireland), a committed amateur chorus clearly well rehearsed by David Young and top-notch orchestra with a stunning brass section – special guests included – held on a tight rein by Read more ...
First Person: St John's College choral conductor Christopher Gray on recording 'Lament & Liberation'
Christopher Gray
When I arrived at St John’s College, Cambridge, in April 2023, it was a daunting prospect to be taking over the reins of a choir with such a distinguished recording heritage: there have been more than 100 albums since the 1950s on some of the UK’s top labels. As a teenager, growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, I could often be found in the small number of specialist classical CD sections in Belfast shops such as HMV. The choral selection in such shops back then was dominated by a tiny number of pioneering groups that included St John’s College Choir under George Guest. Like many Read more ...