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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...
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,...
Stephen Layton has forged his own, near folkloric tradition by conducting his elite choir, Polyphony, in Bach's St John Passion every year on Good Friday for at least a decade. Yet nothing about their performance is habitual: the renewal of the choir or a change of soloists ignites each performance anew. This year's was a solemn joy. A scaled-down Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment were a...
Herbert Howells' Requiem must be one of the most beautiful and searingly moving works in the entire English sacred musical canon. Written in the early 30s but not released until 1980, it is inextricably linked to untimely youthful death; Howells modelled it on Walford Davies' A Short Requiem of 1915, written in memory of those killed in the war. Later, he drew heavily from it for Hymnus Paradisi...
I’d scarcely sent off my review of the fine recording of the Howells Requiem by Paul McCreesh than this new Hyperion disc arrived on my doormat. By an odd coincidence both works were recorded in the same venue: the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral. Interestingly, both recordings are produced by the same man, Adrian Peacock, though different engineers were employed on each project.
I’m not sure I’ve...
Herbert Howells (1892-1983) perfectly understood the way that liturgical music could stir the spirits. His two Services for Gloucester and St Paul’s Cathedrals, magnificently exploit ecclesiastical acoustics while bringing to the canticle texts a fluid lyrical gift, an imaginative harmonic spectrum and a sense of occasion. The disc takes ts title from the sparer, introspective Requiem, to which,...