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…
Category: Recordings
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…
Heinrich Schütz: David & Salomon – selections from the Psalms of David and Song of Solomon
This first foray into the music of Heinrich Schütz from Les Cris de Paris is an absolute winner, a superb addition to the composer’s discography of more than 100 recordings.…
Enoch Arden: a new recording of Richard Strauss’s melodrama from Christopher Kent and Gamal Khamis
Melodrama: literally, the joining of music (melos) and drama. The word has various connotations, though, relating to genre, method and expression. Denoting a work for narrator and instruments, and sometimes…
Tormento d’amore: Italian love laments from Ian Bostridge and Cappella Neapolitana
The booklet article by the musicologist Dinko Fabris which accompanies Tormento d’amore – Ian Bostridge’s most recent recording, with Antonio Florio’s Cappella Neapolitana – is titled ‘From Venice to Naples…
From the Hills of Dream: the forgotten songs of Arnold Bax
In a 1949 broadcast, Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953) declared: ‘Yeats’ poetry means more to me than all the music of the centuries.’ And, when the Irish poet and dramatist died…
Baroque pornography in Alexis Piron’s Vasta, Reine de Bordélie
One of the more enduring pleasures of having had a classical education – at least if you still remember it – is reading the richness of its literature: from Homer…
A third volume of British song from James Gilchrist and Nathan Williamson
With this third and final instalment of their survey of 100 years of British song James Gilchrist and Nathan Williamson bring us up to the present day. Their focus is…