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When the chirpy Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, the instantly singable Star Carol, or the literal sound effects of the charming Donkey Carol are wrapped up in such glittering, top-quality packaging as Stephen Layton’s Polyphony and The City of London Sinfonia, its seasonal allure is sealed. Finely Polished performances, served up with a warm and festive mulled-wine sensation’
'Polyphony beautifully continue the English tradition with joyful refinement'
'A treat for all Rutter fans! … the program is bound to satisfy anyone seeking a balanced program of Christmas choral music done with sensitivity and taste'
If audience participation muddies the join-in carols in the King’s disc, here’s something cool, poised and honed to perfection. The breathtakingly precise Polyphony under Stephen Layton sing my favourite performance of these exquisite motets. Poulenc gives us the eery depth in ‘O magnum mysterium’, the inimitable delicacy of ‘Videntes stellam’ and breaks into peals of robust joy with ‘Hodie...
'Other than to assure you that it works for me, need I say more?'
Sublime music and a Requiem performance to die for
“Less is more”, a phrase coined by Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe, seemed an apt description for the style Stephen Layton brought to his direction of the ACO and the ACO Voices. Like van der Rohe, Layton's concerns were also with architecture, a musical one in which each detail was carefully wrought as part of a larger construction of...