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It’s the physical separation between the singers that you notice first when the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge takes to the stage, half a body width to spare on either side of all 30-plus of them.
Then you hear the individual voices, which, horror of horrors to the choral-textbook devotee, stand out, each one having a sort of distinctive grain or texture to it that you could drag your fingers...
The scholar choristers of Trinity College Cambridge are the brainiest singers you’re likely to hear, and it shows in the intelligence they bring to their music.
With 700 years of history, and alumni who have included Isaac Newton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord Byron, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, a Musica Viva concert tour by the choir under their director Stephen Layton is always going...
It was as audacious as they go. What encore could possibly follow the stunningly ecstatic final bars of Howells’ famous ‘Te Deum’ (Collegium Regale) ending a program of breath-taking vocal virtuosity covering 300 years of church music? Why, Duke Ellington’s It don’t Mean a Thing of course.
The sheer exhilaration of hearing American jazz so suddenly was typical of shocks to the system delivered by...
★★★★
As optional extras to its concert seasons of chamber music, Musica Viva Australia has for decades past toured some of England’s most famous church choirs, notably the Choirs of King’s and St John’s Colleges, Cambridge. These have been traditional affairs with boys dressed in ruffs and robes joined by male alto, tenor and bass choral scholars, their repertoire drawn mainly from the English...
★★★★½
As on their 2010 Musica Viva tour, this excellent choral body began with Arvo Pärt's Bogoróditse Djévo, the deft balance and shape of this atmospheric prayer showing evidence of director Stephen Layton's painstaking preparation. Not that he appeared straight away: the Cambridge singers negotiated the Pärt, Byrd and Purcell anthems as well as the Salvator mundi motet by Tallis without a...
★★★★★"A spiritually profound, sensuously crafted performance from the Rolls-Royce of choirs"
At the first Melbourne performance of its national tour, there was a moment during the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge’s performance of the 'Kyrie' from Frank Martin’s wonderful but often neglected Mass for Double Choir, that seemed to perfectly capture the audience’s experience. After a sudden tutti...