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Stephen Layton and the Trinity College Choir unearth choral works of rare beauty.
First, a health warning: it is impossible to do anything else but listen once the opening track of this glorious album begins. Don’t pop it on your iPod if you’re planning on walking anywhere quickly as you’re more likely to find yourself staring off into the distance wistfully instead. And it will keep you...
Stephen Layton and the Trinity College Choir unearth choral works of rare beauty.
First, a health warning: it is impossible to do anything else but listen once the opening track of this glorious album begins. Don’t pop it on your iPod if you’re planning on walking anywhere quickly as you’re more likely to find yourself staring off into the distance wistfully instead. And it will keep you...
When I first heard that Trinity College was putting out a recording of all American music I started salivating. I had the opportunity to hear them live on their home turf last year. Our study abroad group made a stop in Cambridge to listen to Trinity College sing evensong last spring. During that evensong, they sang two American works, one of which ended up on this recording. I was blown away...
Eriks Esenvalds (b. 1977) is a Latvian composer who, according to the notes, comes from a new Latvia free of all repressive Socialist Realism strictures. Yet his music is hardly avant-garde either, and his teachers have included Jonathan Harvey and Richard Danielpour, among others, in a very cosmopolitan set. But his music will inevitably remind any listener of Arvo Pärt or earlier John Taverner...
'When composing a work, I give myself to the temptation of the creative work -- a journey, whose twisting roads persistently, but convincingly, bring me to the final sounds of the score.
'Only then do I exhale,' says Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds (born 1977 at Priekule) whose orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal and piano works have been performed in Europe and the USA.
Esenvalds will spend two...
Hyperion has done it again, with this stunning album of mostly sacred choral works by the younger-generation Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds, perfectly performed by Stephen Layton’s ever-welcome Polyphony and Carolyn Sampson, one of our finest sopranos— supported by the strings of the Britten Sinfonia. Layton, like many of his top-tier colleagues, can’t resist the remarkable flood of new music...