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Stephen Layton has forged his own, near folkloric tradition by conducting his elite choir, Polyphony, in Bach's St John Passion every year on Good Friday for at least a decade. Yet nothing about their performance is habitual: the renewal of the choir or a change of soloists ignites each performance anew. This year's was a solemn joy. A scaled-down Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment were a...
It is a perilously short fall from the grace of tradition to the blight of routine, and it would be understandable if Stephen Layton – who has been dusting off Bach’s St John Passion for Easters innumerable – were to let Polyphony’s annual Bach performance drive itself. In the event, of course, no such slippage occurred, and the 2012 account was electrifying in its immediacy, dramatic momentum...
Polyphony's Good Friday performance of Bach's St John Passion has become an annual fixture, but there was no suggestion of routine about this Easter's vital account under the choir's founder-conductor Stephen Layton. Performed without an interval but with a couple of pauses – including a moment of meditative silence following Jesus's death – the two-hour-long structure of choruses, chorales,...
Herbert Howells (1892-1983) perfectly understood the way that liturgical music could stir the spirits. His two Services for Gloucester and St Paul’s Cathedrals, magnificently exploit ecclesiastical acoustics while bringing to the canticle texts a fluid lyrical gift, an imaginative harmonic spectrum and a sense of occasion. The disc takes ts title from the sparer, introspective Requiem, to which,...
I may not always like the music, but never has a recording of choral music conducted by Stephen Layton failed to move me. This one is no exception, and in this particular case, the music happens to be admirable. The choral works of Herbert Howells (1892-1983), including his Requiem, are well represented in the recording catalogues and very well served. But even though the market may be saturated...
This is a fine programme for Howells fans, eschewing the 'Coll. Reg.' canticles and the organ works, and including the lesser-heard Salve Regina and the Hymn for St Ceciliaas well as the 'Gloucester' canticles. The Requiem itself, like the other unaccompanied pieces here, is recorded in the gorgeous reverberation of the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral. Those works with organ are done at Lincoln...