Until just recently the church music of Pelham Humfrey (1647/8-74) was represented on disc with just two dedicated recordings: one from 1992 with the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge (Nicholas…
Category: Reviews
Opera Holland Park marks Holocaust Memorial Day in words and music
In November 2014, an exhibition opened in Brno entitled Janáček’s Most Talented Student to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the death of the Czech composer Pavel Haas. In 1941, Haas…
Silenced art speaks powerfully in English Touring Opera’s Shostakovich-Britten pairing
Six years before he composed the Six Romances on Verses by British Poets (namely, Shakespeare, Raleigh and Burns), Shostakovich’s career as a composer of opera came to an abrupt halt…
Opera Rara bring Donizetti’s Il Paria in from the cold
‘Entirely without merit,’ wrote one contemporary reviewer of Donizetti’s Il Paria, which received only six performances in January 1829 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and then disappeared into…
Soli Deo Gloria: Philippe Pierlot directs the Ricercar Consort and Collegium Vocale in Bach’s cantatas
Under the direction of Belgian viola da gamba player Philippe Pierlot, the Ricercar Consort continue their exploration of J.S. Bach’s sacred cantatas – an intermittent project over the last twenty…
James King, Eileen Farrell and William Steinberg premiere Act II of Tristan und Isolde with the Boston Symphony in 1972
Between 1959 and 1973, a year after William Steinberg ended his tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, works by Richard Wagner had featured only rarely on his…
The Britten Sinfonia create subtle but stirring sonic worlds at Wigmore Hall
Old and new were interwoven in this concert presented by soprano Jennifer France and five members of the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Jack Sheen. The ancient warp was the music…
English Touring Opera presents a powerful pairing of Tippett and Shostakovich
Michael Tippett’s 1943 cantata for tenor and piano, Boyhood’s End, was one of first vocal works composed specifically for Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten. It was first performed on 5th…
A Choral Odyssey with The Sixteen
2020 marked the 20th anniversary of The Sixteen’s annual Choral Pilgrimage tour. In 2000, founder and director Harry Christophers instituted the Choral Pilgrimage, taking the ensemble to English cathedrals from York to…
Il tabarro: Marek Janowski and the Dresden Philharmonic continue their series of verismo operas
During the 1880s and 1890s, Italian publishers were making a concerted effort to find a successor to Giuseppe Verdi who, however, remained a towering force in Italian operatic life. The…