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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...
Will only male choirs do for Howells's sacred music? So previous commentators have insisted, though only the most rigid epigone would say the same for the cantatas of Bach. By the same token, well-enunciated American English isn't out of place, especially when Massachusetts-based Gloriae Dei Cantores sing a work written for Washington National Cathedral - a late and unfinished Te Deum, at that,...
In a work intended to console, it's important that the actual sound the choir makes is warmly consoling. It certainly is in this new Trinity College recording of Howells's 1932 Requiem: the tonal blend drawn from the choir by conductor Stephen Layton, suffused by the acoustic of the Lady Chapel in Ely Cathedral, is glowing, and makes the opening 'Salvator mundi' a spiritually palliative...
The Choir of Trinity College, a group going back to the 14th century, brings a luminous, beautifully balanced sound to a range of music by Herbert Howells (1892-1983). The dynamics are carefully sculpted. Crescendos and even decrescendos thrill. This is approachable music - I picture it like a bright painting, with primary colours. Everyone will have their favorite parts. I love the dreamy fading...