Stephen Layton's dramatic conviction makes a powerful testimony of Handel’s musical centrepiece.

Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining. In the dark days of World War II, Cambridge was a bleak place; emptied of students and the famous windows of King’s College Chapel put in storage. Attempts were made to keep up appearances. Services in college chapels were more or less maintained, despite a dearth of adult male singers and college organists being called up. A middle-aged Herbert Howells was called upon to deputise at St. John’s College. Having weathered the death of his young son from meningitis and finding his style of music increasingly unfashionable, Howells found solace in university life. Amongst the supportive colleagues he found at Cambridge was the Dean of King’s, Eric Milner-White. He suggested that Howells should write some settings of the canticles for the college chapel. Taking up the challenge reinvigorated Howells’s composing career and gave Anglicans some of their most beloved 20th-century music. Howells eventually completed his music for King’s, setting all three choral services: Matins, Holy Communion and Evensong under the college’s Latin name.  One of the many advantages of this new recording is having all three services on the one disc. The evening canticles have been recorded countless times, but the other…

Latvian Ēriks Ešenvalds is one of the latest group of non-British composers to be lionised by that most British of establishments, the Oxbridge choral scene. From 2011 to 2013 he was Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge where he collaborated extensively with the choir. Its director, Stephen Layton perceptively describes Ešenvalds as “a compositional chameleon”. Therein lies a dilemma. Undoubtedly greatly talented and adept at bringing alive all manner of different texts, Ešenvalds’ music left me wondering where his real voice lay. His Trinity Te Deum is as grand as any other essay in that genre, while his Merton College Service is served up in attractive homophony spiced with cluster chords, but which leaves the listener thinking it could have been composed any time in the last half-century. O Salutaris Hostia starts promisingly with echoes of MacMillan but becomes cloyingly saccharine. Amazing Grace is given a treatment that would make Hollywood envious. Moving away from church music Ešenvalds becomes more original and individual. Northern Lights and his two settings of Sara Teasdale, The New Moon and Stars, suggest there is salvation beyond conformism. Needless to say, Ešenvalds has the best possible advocates in Layton and his…

This wide-ranging survey of Pärt’s choral music is the third disc of his music performed by Stephen Layton’s Polyphony. As with the other two recordings, the singers’ clarity and unanimity of tone confirm them as ideal interpreters of this music. An added attraction is that this program takes us to back to some of Pärt’s earliest choral writing: the austere Solfeggio of 1963. The haunting musical stasis of this piece belies its unswerving adherence to the rules of serialism. Seven years later Pärt’s setting of the Nicean Creed, Summa shows the composer emerging into his “tintinnabulist” period and embracing the so-called “holy minimalism” that has become a hallmark of his music. Another movement charted by this disc is Pärt’s journey from the confines of Soviet-era Estonia into the freedom of the wider, multicultural world of the last quarter-century. The works recorded here demonstrate that Pärt’s style both transcends time and place, but is also influenced by people and history. Virgencita, a 2012 work receiving its first recording, celebrates the story of the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Guadalupe, Mexico and reflects both the tenderness and passion of… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Colourful, inventive and utterly appealing, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is one of those works that listeners enjoy returning to again and again. All the more reason then, to have a good recording – such as this one. Stephen Layton brings his customary insight to the presentation of this series of six linked cantatas that were designed to be sung on various days of the Christmas season and gathers together an impressive group of performers that give the work a truly festive air. Chief among the many attractive features of this performance is the incisive singing and diction of the Trinity College Cambridge Choir. Jauchzet, frohlocket, the opening chorus, is given a stately swagger that establishes a wonderfully joyful mood, but equally there is no loss of rhythmic momentum in such florid choral writing as Ehre sei Gott in the second cantata. Layton’s soloists are all first rate. James Gilchrist is an excellent, honey-toned Evangelist who tells the story with clarity and conviction. Katherine Watson has a suitably angelic soprano voice, while countertenor Iestyn Davies (a Layton regular) brings warmth and musicianship to everything he sings. The rich, seasoned bass of Matthew Brook cuts an imposing figure in Grosser Herr, und starker…