Poets from W.H. Auden to Shakespeare and Goethe to Racine fired Benjamin Britten’s musical imagination and kindled an artistic response that had little equal among 20th-century British composers. Nowhere do…
Category: Recordings
Mozart’s Lucio Silla: a live recording from Laurence Equilbey and the Insula orchestra
In Mozart’s Operas: a critical study (1913), Edward J. Dent pronounced Lucio Silla to be ‘a frigid piece of formality’ and ‘a mediocre opera, not even as good as Mitridate’. …
Alice Coote & Julius Drake present a collection of popular Schubert lieder
Alice Coote’s recent disc, Schubert 21 Songs, joins an already well-filled and distinguished discography. She and her long-term collaborator Julius Drake curate a wide-ranging selection bookended by two versions each…
A sonically stirring ‘Song of the Earth’ from Le balcon and Maxime Pascal
Performances and recordings of Rainer Riehn’s 1983 chamber-ensemble arrangement of Mahler’s symphony-cum-song-cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, seem quite common these days – perhaps even more so than the original…
Colourise: a superb new disc by London Choral Sinfonia
In 1951, the English Opera Group commissioned a work from Lennox Berkeley, to be performed at the fifth Aldeburgh Festival the following year. That work, the Variations on a Hymn…
Michel-Richard de Lalande: Grands Motets
During the 17th century, daily religious observance was a regular feature at the French court. In the royal chapel Louis XIV was a habitual presence for Low Mass where custom…
René Jacobs revisits Bach’s Mass in B minor
Having enjoyed René Jacobs’ superb recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis which was issued by harmonia mundi in 2021, I was looking forward to this new account of Bach’s Mass in B…
Resurrexi! The Choir of Keble College, Oxford
There have been some fine recordings in recent years from the Choir of Keble College, Oxford, and this is the first disc directed by Paul Brough who succeeded Matthew Martin…
Vivaldi: The Great Venetian Mass – an inventive reimagining from Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants
It’s quite refreshing to read the rationale for a period-instrument recording which closes with the statement that the conductor-author makes ‘no great claims for the authenticity’ of the project. But,…
Mother, Sister, Daughter: Musica Secreta create a community of sisters through spiritual song
Musica Secreta’s co-director, Laurie Stras, relishes an archival detective hunt. The ensemble’s 2019 recording, From Darkness into Light, presented the fruits of Stras’s discovery of what she described as ‘seventeen…