If you think soprano Mary Bevan is associated only with Baroque repertoire, think again. Yes, she’s recently wowed audiences in Handel’s Alcina at Covent Garden, and she’s about to embark…
Category: Recordings
Sacroprofano: Sacred & Secular Vivaldi from Tim Mead and Arcangelo
On the concert platform, operatic stage and recording studio, Tim Mead has established himself as one of Britain’s foremost countertenors. This recent issue from Alpha is his first solo album…
A dramatic masterclass from Véronique Gens in Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine
This recent issue from Alpha brings together two sides of Poulenc’s strikingly individual musical personality. Both works, some ten years apart, inhabit a similar bittersweet quality, yet while his operatic…
Machaut’s Remede de Fortune: the Art of Music, Poetry and Love
Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune (c.1340) is at once a coming-of-age tale; a didactic work on the arts of poetry, music, rhetoric and memory; a microcosm of, and manual for, fourteenth-century…
The Sphere of Intimacy: magical miniatures from Cyrille Dubois and Christophe Rousset
At the end of the seventeenth century, the Parisian publisher Christophe Ballard, in collaboration with his son Jean-Baptiste-Christophe, undertook an ambitious artistic project to publish a new periodical, Recueils d’airs…
Echo: an exquisite new disc from Ruby Hughes
“Words mean more than what is set down on paper”, the poet Maya Angelou has written. “It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning”. These assertions may…
Barnaby Smith goes back to Bach
Barnaby Smith’s debut solo disc was titled, simply, Handel. This, his second, once again a collaboration with the Illyria Consort, announces its focus with similar succinctness: Bach. It is, in…
Leoncavallo’s Zingari: another gem from Opera Rara
When Ruggero Leoncavallo’s one-act dramma lirico, Zingari, premiered at the London Hippodrome in September 1912, the Manchester Guardian noted that the large audience greeted it with enthusiastic applause, repeatedly calling…
Superb selection of Psalms from the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge
This recent collection of psalms from the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge is a fine tribute to the work of Andrew Nethsingha who has been its Director of Music…
A masterly traversal of Duparc songs
The habit among composers of almost excessive self-criticism has been a curiously French phenomenon over the last century, typified by Dukas, Duruflé and his younger, more progressive contemporary Henri Dutilleux.…