Aldeburgh Festival: Polyphony (Concert Review - The Eastern Daily Press, 2006)

This world-renowned festival (happily on our doorstep) entered its second week with two exciting and rewarding concerts.

Conducted with flourish and style by Stephen Layton, Polyphony sang an imposing and uninterrupted programme of Austro-German pieces to an exacting and demanding degree.

Opening with a couple of motets by Schutz, it provided for a bright and cheerful start on a glorious summer's day. It couldn't have been better!

Bach's double-choir masterpiece - Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied - followed. It's a tricky piece of writing by any standards and a strong test for any choir, but Polyphony sang it with firmness and authority and showed why they're one of the finest choirs in the land.

Six songs by Hugo Wolf provided a nice, simple contrast to it, and the rest of the programme included two ethereal pieces by Peter Cornelius as well as Arnold Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden, an early work by this second Viennese school composer that showed the light and the way forward!