City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong: Mozart Requiem (Concert Review - Time Out Hong Kong, 2012)

You’ve got to hand it to Die Konzertisten: getting the founder of renowned choral group Polyphony to head up the group’s inaugural Counterpoint Music Festival was a stroke of genius. Yes, we appreciate it on a pun level. But it also works on a musical level. After all, few people in the choral realm have enjoyed such a fast crescendoing popularity as English conductor, Stephen Layton.

And if there’s one thing to be said for Layton, he certainly knows how to marry the popular with the critically acclaimed. Indeed, as founder of Polyphony and his current role as music director of Trinity College, Cambridge, he’s excelled in balancing the classical tradition with big-charting recordings, which have thrice won him Grammy nominations (most recently for this year’s Best Choral Performance Grammy for his recording, Beyond All Mortal Dreams – American A Cappella).

It’s all the more appropriate, then, that Layton comes to Hong Kong to lead choral group Die Konzertisten and the CCOHK in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem – a work firmly placed at the massively popular end of the choral tradition. You may think you know the Requiem’s Agnus Dei, Lacrimosa or Lux Aeterna inside out – but we hope, with his reputation as a choral interpreter, Layton may have us hearing it in a whole new lux.

Mark Tjhung