With a turn as Wagner’s tortured knight and an intelligent solo recital, Kaufmann makes a triumphant return to the stage. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
The SOH, Australian National Academy of Music and Pacific Opera announce a new concert series in the Utzon Room. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
The early music specialists will head to Australia to mark the occasion with madrigals from Cremona and Mantua.
Dame Vera Lynn rings in her centenary with an album of old favourites bolstered with brand new duets. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
The ne plus ultra of Mozart boxes: with curation like this, Amadeus’s 225th death-day box will be hard to surpass.
The American label adds the French star to a stable that already includes Jonas Kaufmann and Juan Diego Flórez. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
The much-loved conductor is hosting a series of spontaneous choirs, where everyone is invited and everyone can sing. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
The Estonian composer, best known for his folk-inflected choral works, has died at 86 of long-term illnesses. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in
A meditative, atmospheric journey through a unique and fascinating corner of sacred music.
Trust Harry Christophers and The Sixteen to get to the heart of the matter. This selection of 22 carols is an engaging mix of old and new, sung unaccompanied and without the cloying sentimentality that often mars the Christmas season and threatens to make a mockery of a story that could have particular resonance in our own age of mass human displacement. Here we have singing that conveys wonderment and joy, but also empathetically touches on the less glamorous aspects of the human condition. The older carols are not necessarily well known. As Christophers notes, some are out fashion, but none the worse for that. Traditional compositions such as This endris night with its catchy tune together with the Somerset Carol and the Gallery Carol both of which evoke innocent merriment, are all worth reviving, while better known 20th-century favourites such as Peter Warlock’s Bethlehem Down, John Ireland’s The Holy Boy and Henry Walford Davies’ O little town of Bethlehem have an appealing intimacy. A welcome stylistic variety informs the choice of newer carols. Whether it is the close harmony of Morten Lauridsen’s O magnum mysterium, the subtle but effective motoric minimalism of Howard Skempton’s Adam lay… Continue reading Get…
Super-sized Messiah: no fries, but plenty of spicy extras.
Renowned conductor Antonio Pappano is best known as music director of the Royal Opera House, but he is also a very fine pianist. Songs on texts by William Shakespeare finds Pappano accompanying the equally renowned English historian and tenor Ian Bostridge on an expansive collection featuring composers across five centuries who have set Shakespeare’s texts and musical dramatic devices, very few of which are stand-alone songs, to music. Not surprisingly, English composers are a strong presence: these include Morley, Byrd and their contemporary John Wilson, whose Take, o take those lips away is a highlight. Quilter’s Come away, death is mysterious and affecting, greatly impressing and influencing Warlock, who is also featured here, along with Britten and Tippett. Bostridge is commanding throughout, and justly famous for his attention to detail and extraordinarily nuanced delivery. The recording is glorious: rich, spacious and resonant. The final track on this collection, When that I was and a little tiny boy (Anon.), sung a cappella by Bostridge, is nothing short of extraordinary, from both performance and recording perspectives. The sumptuous packaging contains meticulously researched and detailed liner notes by Christopher Wilson, and includes all song texts. This is an excellent and beautifully… Continue reading…
Edmund Rubbra is a composer who has faded from English musical history, written out of a narrative that jumps straight from Vaughan Williams and Holst to Britten and Walton. But this release from The Sixteen is a defiant and overdue attempt to rewrite that history, to establish Rubbra where he belongs, as one of the most distinctive harmonic voices of his generation – not the conservative throwback he has been painted, but a composer for whom the possibilities of tonality were far from exhausted. That voice might emerge most emphatically in Rubbra’s 11 symphonies, but his choral works distil their harmonic language into something cleaner, more concise. The sonic imagination here roams widely, from the craggy, sharp-edged beauty of the Tenebrae Motets to the gauzy clouds of modal richness established by the two choirs of the Missa Cantuariensis and the lightly-worn contrapuntal skill of Vain Wits and Except the Lord. This music gives little away on the page – its impact is all in the pacing and careful textural balance of performance. Harry Christophers deploys his singers with care, ensuring absolute vertical clarity and balance, but also a horizontal flow that propels music whose organic, evolving structures… Continue reading Get…
