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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
Handel: Messiah (Concert Review - The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2005)
Strong 'Messiah' conductor carries the night The season for Messiah envy – the ever-green variety – is upon us. Those who don't tire of this most original of G.F. Handel's oratorios look longingly at other cities, where more thought and care appear to be put into the piece's annual, holiday-time performances. The Philadelphia Orchestra's lineup contained only a single "name" - countertenor Michael
MacMillan: Seven Last Words from the Cross (CD Review - Classic FM Magazine, 200
Best buy (opera/vocal) September 2005 In the decade since Stephen Layton’s Polyphony made the premiere recording of MacMillan’s Seven Last Words, choir and conductor have matured in all the best ways. This new Hyperion disc, which includes the first recordings of the Scottish composer’s recent Te Deum and On the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, offers an emotionally charged counterblast to thos
Pärt: Triodion (CD Review - bbc.co.uk, 2003)
There’s a quiet and cumulative power to these works, given performances of luminous purity by Polyphony and Stephen Layton. ‘There’s a line in this disc’s title track, from an Orthodox ode addressed to Saint Nicholas: “therewithal hast thou acquired: by humility – greatness, by poverty – riches.” This might have been written about Arvo Pärt’s compositional technique, here liberated from the minima
Mozart: Requiem - Australian Chamber Orchestra (Concert Review - The Sydney Morn
Sublime music and a Requiem performance to die for “Less is more”, a phrase coined by Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe, seemed an apt description for the style Stephen Layton brought to his direction of the ACO and the ACO Voices. Like van der Rohe, Layton's concerns were also with architecture, a musical one in which each detail was carefully wrought as part of a larger construction of eminent
Pärt: Passio (Concert Review - The Times, 2001)
St John's is the most direct of the Passions, some would say the most tendentious: a couple of years ago there was a great kerfuffle following Deborah Warner's operatic production of Bach's version at ENO, where the dramatised, Englished narrative made it uncomfortably clear exactly where the evangelist was placing the blame for Jesus's fate. It makes you thankful for the general irreligion of the