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Oxygen was at a premium on a wet, unseasonably warm December evening, but Polyphony and the Academy of Ancient Music banished every trace of stuffiness from the atmosphere through the light and air of their musicianship. The audience rose twice to its collective feet: once for the dubious tradition of standing for the ‘Hallelujah!’ chorus, and again at the end to honour a Messiah of exceptional...
An aspiration of many years’ standing has been to listen to J. S. Bach’s cantatas following the liturgical sequence. I haven’t progressed much beyond Quinquagesima before getting deflected, but at least the Advent cantatas are beginning to sink in. Their memorable sense of sober reflection and expectation supplies the right context for the eruption of high spirits that opens Bach’s suite of six...
I don't regard myself as more than averagely sentimental and there isn't too much music that reduces me to tears. But a moment in Britten's St Nicolas does it with press-button certainty, when the pickled boys come back to life and sing their Alleluias. And as usual it had me passing off my snuffles as a cold last night at Smith Square where Stephen Layton performed the piece with combined forces...
Stephen Layton transformed this from an average, middle-class seasonal celebration into a magnificent musical event
Mulled wine, mince pies, crackers — and hymn sheets: great excitement at the St John’s Smith Square Christmas Festival when a massive audience met the massed forces of the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, the Holst Singers, boys from the Temple Church Choir, and the City of...
I don't regard myself as more than averagely sentimental and there isn't too much music that reduces me to tears. But a moment in Britten's St Nicolas does it with press-button certainty, when the pickled boys come back to life and sing their Alleluias. And as usual it had me passing off my snuffles as a cold last night at Smith Square where Stephen Layton performed the piece with combined forces...
The U.S. and Canada may be secular nations, but you’d never know it from Beyond All Mortal Dreams: American A Cappella(Hyperion), the latest CD from the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. All but 5 of theCD’s 19 selections by American and Canadian composers of the present and past centuries are explicitly Christian, and one of two settings of poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow includes such...