This is a more intimate version of John Rutter's Requiem, which uses smaller ensembles, enhancing the sense of reassurance that the music and the text offer. Rutter's music is almost always warmly tonal, built with a simplicity in its textures that descends from the tradition of Vaughan Williams. Here, frequently only one or two instruments are ...
René Jacobs' performance of Handel's 1750 version of Messiah is remarkable for the fresh insights he brings to such a familiar work. His reading is fleet but never hurried, and movements flow fluidly from each other, virtually without pause. This Messiah is an integrated whole, whose ebbing and flowing move it inexorably toward its climaxes, ...
A fairly random collection of the sacred music of three English composers from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, each disc of this Harmonia Mundi three-disc set nevertheless has its attractive qualities. In the disc given to two masses and three motets by the celebrated William Byrd, the all-male Chanticleer sings with an austere ...
John Stainer's The Crucifixion is England's best-known example of the musical Passion -- inspired equally by the Passion settings of J.S. Bach, the oratorios of Felix Mendelssohn, and traditional Anglican service music. The resemblance to Bach is in the structural alteration between choruses and solo-voice recitatives; Mendelssohn's influence can ...
This is a quiet, chamber performance of a magnificent group of Henry Purcell's sacred works, originally issued on the Columns Classics label in 1997; listener reactions to it will likely depend on how the individual listener feels about the trend toward the downsizing of Baroque performance forces. The Clare College Choir, Cambridge, is a youthful ...
What the listener will think of this CD will depend partly on what he or she thinks of Rutter's musical rendition of sentimentalist religion. It's nicely executed here -- as nicely as on Rutter's own recordings with his handpicked choir -- by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, under Timothy Brown. And the two outer works on the album are ...
Samuel Sebastian Wesley, son of composer Samuel Wesley and grandson of Charles Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was the preeminent composer in early Victorian England. His legacy is secure because of the continued prominence of his choral anthems in the repertoires of choirs of Protestant churches throughout the English-speaking world. This Naxos ...
John Blow described Venus and Adonis as a masque, but for all intents and purposes, it's an opera, as fully as Dido and Aeneas is, and it should make anyone who considers the Purcell the first English opera think again. The two works have much in common in their dramatic structure, subject matter, length, and level of musical expressiveness. Based ...
John Blow described Venus and Adonis as a masque, but for all intents and purposes, it's an opera, as fully as Dido and Aeneas is, and it should make anyone who considers the Purcell the first English opera think again. The two works have much in common in their dramatic structure, subject matter, length, and level of musical expressiveness. Based ...
Call it the breakthrough of John Tavener, or the mainstreaming, depending on your perspective. Beginning around the turn of the millennium, this British exemplar of holy minimalism began to move away from his identification with the Eastern Orthodox faith. At the same time, his musical language broadened, maintaining its repetitive sound but ...
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