Reviews
Review Search
In 1997, the Holst Singers and Stephen Layton produced a disc that immediately became a cult classic and a best-seller. Ikon, a selection of great Russian choral music from the 19th century, dazzled with its grand, opulent beauty. Now the same forces return with Ikon II. Many of the works recorded here are by composers whose names will not be familiar—but the extraordinary quality of the music is...
It is often said of Nicholas Maw, who died in 2009, that he was born at the wrong time. The lyrical, predominantly tonal idiom he cultivated from the 1960s onwards – so strikingly at odds with musical styles favoured by his more celebrated contemporaries – suggested his heart was beating with the compositional currents of the early 20th century. Certainly, this was how Maw himself understood it....
****
A rhapsodic critic once said: “For generations people will be buying tickets to hear his music”. It’s a cheering prophecy, though to judge by the half-empty auditorium on Sunday night, when one work by Nicholas Maw followed another, complete fulfilment seems a distance away. Yet listening to a basketful of the late English composer’s compositions, you can certainly understand some reasons...
The British composer Nicholas Maw (1935 – 2009) received mixed reception during his life; dubbed a ‘neo-romantic’ his music was in stark contrast with the European avant-garde. The Telegraph obituary from May 2009 wrote that “at a time when Boulez and Stockhausen were in the ascendant, and the sort of big Romantic pieces Maw was writing were deeply unfashionable, he refused to change or abandon...
Another new cantata with two singers – a tenor (Ian Bostridge) and a baritone (Roderick Williams) – ventured towards similar territory but in an entirely contrasting manner. Commissioned by the late Richard Hickox, Colin Matthews's No Man's Land was performed by the excellent City of London Sinfonia, rigorously conducted by Stephen Layton. The text, by poet Christopher Reid, and with echoes of...
The Prom the night before brought another major premiere (though not a BBC commission). This was Colin Matthews’s No Man’s Land, set to a text by Christopher Reid, in which we encounter two dead soldiers in the trenches of the first world war. A feeling of remembrance is everywhere in this piece, not least because it so strongly recalls Britten’s War Requiem with its two soldiers walking “...