Reviews
Review Search
Karl Jenkins' greatest music reinterpreted for a capella choir: John Suchet's Album of the Week
5 May 2014
This album of 19 compositions by Karl Jenkins features new arrangements of some of the composer's best-known works - including The Armed Man, Gloria and The Peacemakers.
Hearing Jenkins' compositions in a capella form makes for a much more intimate and emotional experience than usual,...
****
A truly festive account of Bach's colourful Christmas masterpiece.
Colourful, inventive and utterly appealing, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is one of those works that listeners enjoy returning to again and again. All the more reason then, to have a good recording – such as this one. Stephen Layton brings his customary insight to the presentation of this series of six linked cantatas that were...
No one can accuse the Lincoln Center Festival of timidity after its presentation this weekend of the British composer John Tavener's seven-hour musical vigil "The Veil of the Temple."
The performance of this self-consciously mystical work for a chorus of 120, vocal soloists, organ, brass and percussion ensembles, Tibetan horn, temple bowls and Indian harmonium, began at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday at...
Sunday and Monday night's Proms featured two composers who are leading lights of the vogue for meditative ''spiritual'' music with an Eastern flavour (funny how ''spiritual'' and ''Eastern'' always go together, like ham and eggs).
The first of them was John Tavener, who joined a packed Albert Hall audience for a shortened version of his vast, six-hour ritual The Veil of the Temple. Would it have...
The choral director Stephen Layton's Good Friday performances with his chamber choir Polyphony, of Bach's St John Passion at St John's Smith Square, have become quite a fixture in recent years, to judge by the lengthy last-minute box office queue hoping for return tickets this time round.
And it's no surprise, either, for not only had he the support of the period players of The Academy of Ancient...