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COMPOSER John Rutter made a great impression on a Torquay audience, when he came to speak to Torbay Recorded Music Society earlier this year.
A new full-price Hyperion disc of his choral music, comprising the Requiem (almost 36 minutes) and several other pieces written for a host of varying occasions, is easy to recommend. It is sung by Polyphony with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, conducted by...
Few John Rutter fans will be without a copy of the composer's own Collegium recording of his Requiem. But given the piece's immense and widespread popularity, alternative versions, like this one, are bound to proliferate. The cello-led spiritual 'Out of the Deep' probes deeper waters than the anodyne opening movement, but both are charmingly sung by consistently well-balanced voices. Rutter's...
The timbral and textural palette of Russian choral sound is clearly evident to Layton and the ensemble with Tchaikovsky’s setting of Blessed are they whom Thou hast chosen, the octave doublings of melodic passages and eight-part writing sustained with clarity and a lovely feeling for phrase. Of greatest interest, however, is Knut Nystedt's stunningly simple Immortal Bach … Under Stephen Layton’s...
The most interesting discovery to be made on this anthology is Sviridov's choral music, both sacred (though disguised as incidental music for a play under the Soviet regime) and profane (a lovely Blok cycle). A Russian nineteenth-century ancestry is audible in his work, and he is clearly following in the footsteps of Rachmaninov, with a splendid sureness of technique. James Bowman's voice (...
Uniformly charismatic performances. Fine engineering and notes too. Highly recommended.
Take a couple of dozen choice 20th-century Christmas carols, group them imaginatively add a dash of plainchant, and you have a winning recipe. This is what Stephen Layton and his choir Polyphony did for a recent recording, and they brought the programme to St John's Smith Square last week.
Few of the pieces included could be counted as predictable chestnuts. Indeed, each was, in its own way, a...