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Performance *****Recording *****
Since going to Trinity College, Cambridge nine years ago conductor Stephen Layton has taken its choir to new levels of acheivement. And not just in ecclesiastical repertoire: the version of Jingle Bells which opens this recital is full of pep and sparkle. In fact all the popular selections - White Christmas, The Christmas Song, among others - sound notably relaxed...
Centuries of puritanical preaching and religious dogma have worked to supress the eternal human drive to draw enjoyment from matters spiritual. Polyphony and Stephen Layton offer the strongest possible case for approaching the tremendous and the mysterious, however it may be defined, with hearts and minds open to the deepest pleasure.
Their latest album, comprising sacred and ‘spiritual’ choral...
* * * * * 5 Stars
Some Aucklanders have had the pleasure of experiencing the artistry of Stephen Layton in person when he conducted Bach's Bach's Mass in B minor and St John Passion with Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in 2012 and 2014.
Those familiar with the many CDs featuring Layton with his chamber choir, Polyphony, were not disappointed.
Polyphony's celebration of Arvo Part's 80th birthday...
To mark Independence Day here is a disc that makes the mid-20th century in the US seem a pinnacle of choral music.
Bernstein's Missa brevis, in a scorching performance, hits heights of rhythmic ecstasy.
Barber's Agnus Dei, the choral version of his favourite Adagio for strings, tears the heart with its mournful sentimentality.
Randall Thompson's gently radiant Alleluia and Fare Well deserve to be...
Stephen Layton has come up with a most attractive programme of a cappella choral pieces by twentieth century American composers.
I think it's fitting that there's a substantial focus on Samuel Barber for he was arguably the best American writer for voices of his generation. Agnus Dei is his own arrangement of the slow movement from his String Quartet, which acquired even greater celebrity when he...
The peerless choir offer meticulously blended and shaped performances of 20th-century a cappella American choral works. The recital is topped and tailed by Randall Thompson - the contemplative wartime Alleluia and the poignant De La Mare setting Fare Well. In between, we get Barber part songs, Bernstein's Missa Brevis and some decidedly Gallic student Copland.