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Bach: St John Passion (CD Review - The Observer, 2013)
Conductor Stephen Layton, top soloists, the expert choir of Polyphony and the incomparable Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment perform the St John Passion annually at St John’s Smith Square. It’s always a sell-out. Bach revised the work several times. Layton has honed his preferred version, but only aficionados will notice or mind. Concentrate instead on the purity of sound, the emotionally expr
Bach: St John Passion (CD Review - Presto Classical, 2013)
I seem to spend a lot of time in these newsletters enthusing about new discoveries, revived rarities or fresh perspectives on well-known repertoire but today I’m going to evangelise (pun intended) about a very straightforward recording of a very familiar work. This new St John Passion from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Polyphony doesn’t use a new or unfamiliar version of the score;
Bach: B minor Mass (Concert Review - The New Zealand Herald, 2012)
Judging by the near-capacity audience for Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's performance on Thursday of Bach's B minor Mass, our city's choral tradition is still thriving. The most demanding of the orchestra's Choral Masterpieces series to date, this concert benefited from a smaller band of players, some expert soloists and the prime asset of Stephen Layton. The English conductor is justly celebrat
Bach: B minor Mass (Concert Review - bachtrack.com, 2012)
The Mass in B minor was completed in 1749, the year before Bach’s death. Much of the work consists of music Bach composed much earlier in his life (the Kyrie and Gloriafrom one of the Lutheran Masses). The sections he added latter were among the last things he wrote before he died. It is strange for a composer as steeped in the Lutheran tradition as Bach to compose a Latin Mass setting and to this
Bach: St John Passion (Concert Review - Classical Source, 2012)
It is a perilously short fall from the grace of tradition to the blight of routine, and it would be understandable if Stephen Layton – who has been dusting off Bach’s St John Passion for Easters innumerable – were to let Polyphony’s annual Bach performance drive itself. In the event, of course, no such slippage occurred, and the 2012 account was electrifying in its immediacy, dramatic momentum and
Bach: St John Passion (Concert Review - The Guardian, 2012)
Polyphony's Good Friday performance of Bach's St John Passion has become an annual fixture, but there was no suggestion of routine about this Easter's vital account under the choir's founder-conductor Stephen Layton. Performed without an interval but with a couple of pauses – including a moment of meditative silence following Jesus's death – the two-hour-long structure of choruses, chorales, arias