Reviews
Review Search
For months I've been driving around entranced, listening to Cloudburst, a stunning CD from British choral group Polyphony. All of the songs on the disc are by 30 something American composer Eric Whitacre, who has a way of contracting and expanding chords with carefully crafted dissonance and resolution. Members of Polyphony, directed by Stephen Layton, sing of sleep, love, dreams, passion, and...
A lifetime of listening to choral music had not prepared me for such lush harmonies—a cappella voices perfectly tuned and blended. This was my first encounter with Polyphony, possibly the best small (25 or so) professional chorus in the world. Polyphony is from Britain, where choral singing is a national fetish. Since their formation in 1986 by conductor Stephen Layton, they have amassed an...
Right. Stop making the coffee: leave the washing for two minutes, muzzle your children, pull over to the side of the road and listen to this.
Whitacre – I thank You God
This is the music of Eric Whitacre and if you haven’t heard about him you’re surely about to in a big way and there could be no better place to start than a new recording entitled CLOUDBURST dedicated entirely to his choral works...
Composer Eric Whitacre's new Hyperion release marks a most enjoyable collection of his works for (mostly) unaccompanied chorus.
Whitacre's overnight rise to becoming one of America's most successful choral composers is nothing if not remarkable. Like many of the younger generation of composers, he was raised on an omnivorous musical diet that made no distinction between "high" and "low" art. He...
Last year Stephen Layton and Polyphony gave us a very fine CD devoted to the music of the American composer, Morten Lauridsen (b.1943)
Now they follow that up with a programme of music by another, younger American composer, Eric Whitacre. Simply as a point of reference I’d say that anyone who responds positively to Lauridsen’s music should warm equally to Whitacre’s muse. I first encountered his...
