Scandinavian choral reveries: The Norwegian Soloists takes us from comforting to confronting.

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…

The Victorians changed the festive season as we know it, but Dickens changed the way Victorians themselves saw Christmas.

Katie Mitchell is a director who divides her audience. Some champion the probing psychology of her shows, their meticulous, realist visuals, their staunchly feminist agenda. Others balk at what they see as a prefab, one-size-fits-all approach. But whatever your camp, when Mitchell finds a show to suit her inherent sympathies the result is unassailable. This Alcina, originally staged for the 2015 Aix-en-Provence Festival, is the director at her very best – a marriage of concept and psychology so instinctive, so exhilarating in its invention, that it’s impossible to imagine it bettered. Unpacking the limits of power in all its forms – love, magic, violence, authority – Handel’s opera is one of his most probing emotional portraits, and a piece ripe for Mitchell’s gaze. She pulls back the curtain on Alcina’s sorcery, revealing the blunt, unpalatable mechanisms behind her illusions, showing us the woman not the witch. Chloe Lamford’s designs place us in a decaying doll’s house of a set. Rooms are spread over two floors, but only the central salon is fully lit. Within this magic space Alcina (Patricia Petibon) and Morgana (Anna Prohaska) seduce and subdue their lovers, glorying in their youth and beauty…. Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

A composer of Catholic liturgical music in a Lutheran society, Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) was fighting an uphill battle for popularity even during his own lifetime. After his death, his music all but disappeared from the repertoire, and still remains firmly on the fringes of concert programming. One ensemble, however, is doing more than any to change this. For over 20 years, Czech conductor Václav Luks and his superb Collegium 1704 choir and orchestra have been turning out eloquent recordings that celebrate the  intricate counterpoint and bold harmonic gestures of the composer JS Bach so admired. Their latest is particularly interesting: a world premiere recording of the Missa Divi Zaveri, a major 1729 work thus far silenced by the poor condition (including lost parts) of its surviving manuscript. Now Luks himself has produced a complete edition, and the results are thrilling. The Mass features the largest forces Zelenka ever composed for, including four trumpets, timpani, doubled flutes and oboes as well as strings, chorus and SATB soloists. The result is truly festal in scale, possibly an informal audition for the job of kapellmeister at Dresden that would eventually go to Hasse. With no Credo, the centre of musical gravity shifts…

Maestro di Cappella of St. Mark’s Venice, author of over 20 operas and nearly 150 sacred works, teacher of Marcello, Galuppi and Zelenka and admired by Bach and Handel, Antonio Lotti’s diverse and successful career has latterly been distilled down to just two pieces: the unaccompanied Crucifixus settings for eight and ten voices. Now, in a recording dominated by contemporary premieres, Ben Palmer and his Syred Consort attempt to fill in the gaps and restore the reputation of this Baroque master. This is music that sells itself. In Ben Byram-Wigfield’s new editions, it emerges lively with rhythmic interest, texts carefully shaded with word-painting and contrasting solo and ensemble colours, supported by light-footed orchestral accompaniments. These are large-scale festal works of tremendous charm. Where Lotti does fall short of his near-contemporary Vivaldi is in melody. More interested in vertical texture than horizontal line (as both Crucifixus settings so clearly demonstrate), individual vocal parts do suffer from a certain anonymity. Both Lotti’s Crucixifus a8 and his a6 setting form part of larger stand-alone, Credos. The former is presented here as part of the Missa Sancti Christophori – a composite work created from Lotti’s individual Mass movements by his pupil Zelenka (and supplemented…

November's cover story: Opera megastar Joyce DiDonato.