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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...
My Best Choral CD is from Hyperion and showcases music by the still underrated Herbert howells. Stephen Layton and his Trinity College Choir, Cambridge do wonders with Howells brief but eloquent Requiem, the Hymn to St Cecilia and one of our finest hymn tunes composed for All My Hope on God is Founded and dedicated to his son who died very young.
Reviewed by David MellorThe Mail on Sunday
Der englische Komponist Herbert Howells (1892-1983) war eine überaus interessante Persönlichkeit in der englischen Musiklandschaft, dessen Œuvre hierzulande leider viel zu selten beachtet wird. vielleicht weil sein umfangreiches Schaffen im Bereich der anglikanischen Kirchenmusik naturgemäß außerhalb des Einflussgebiets der anglikanischen Kirche weniger Interesse weckt. Dass dies eine äußerst...
The death from polio in 1935 of Herbert Howells' nine-year-old son Michael left a permanent mark on his music. Howells' most famous work Hymnus Paradisi was a memorial to his son that had its musical roots in the unaccompanied Requiem that he composed in the early 1930s, but which was only published just before his death in 1983. The Requiem, with its rather plain settings of Psalms 23 and 121...