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'This is celestial and spine-tingling stuff. Contemporary choral music really doesn't come any better than this'
It is two years since Hyperion introduced the music of Morten Lauridsen to a wider audience and earned a Grammy nomination for its trouble. That first volume of the West Coast American composer's religious work is complemented here by an anthology chiefly of his secular choral writing, though even here there is still a whiff of spirituality.
Mid-Winter Songs from 1983 sets five poems by Robert...
'Stephen Layton's splendiferous disc - the second of Lauridsen's music by these performers - should be on the shelf of each and every choral-music aficionado'
The Northwest-born composer Morten Lauridsen, renowned for his choral music, is the subject of this sumptuous CD by the English vocal ensemble Polyphony, under the direction of Stephen Layton. Their glorious sound and subtle interpretations do complete justice to Lauridsen's scores, including the "Mid-Winter Songs," "Les chansons des roses" and the brand-new, rapturous "Nocturnes," of which this...
The first two days of January are a drab time in Scotland, after the junketing of Hogmanay. So there's a tradition of spicing things up with performances of Messiah. For some reason, this oratorio has attached itself to this period, attracting many punters who, one suspects, never otherwise see the inside of a concert hall. At least, the person next to me, who beat time, stamped her feet and sang...
'The Polyphony Messiah' as I have taken to calling it, has been the final concert of the year for me for the past five years, and it never creases to be a highlight of the musical calendar: a glitch this year meant that my request for tickets was not seen until November 30th, by which time, I was informed, there had already been a run on Press Tickets, with an exceptionally long list. Fortunately...