Reviews
Review Search
Herbert Howells' Requiem must be one of the most beautiful and searingly moving works in the entire English sacred musical canon. Written in the early 30s but not released until 1980, it is inextricably linked to untimely youthful death; Howells modelled it on Walford Davies' A Short Requiem of 1915, written in memory of those killed in the war. Later, he drew heavily from it for Hymnus Paradisi...
I’d scarcely sent off my review of the fine recording of the Howells Requiem by Paul McCreesh than this new Hyperion disc arrived on my doormat. By an odd coincidence both works were recorded in the same venue: the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral. Interestingly, both recordings are produced by the same man, Adrian Peacock, though different engineers were employed on each project.
I’m not sure I’ve...
The old rouge would have kissed them all, the men twice over. Poulenc may have created am impression of easygoing hedonism, and he certainly took an unusual angel on sacred music (monks playing football, indeed!) but his music demands precision and care even at its most rapturous, and there is plenty of rapture as well as wit in this intelligent selected programme. Layton gets a lovely, excact...
The title of this album, Half Monk, Half Rascal —originally coined as “half monk, half thug” by critic Claude Rostand in 1950—sums up perfectly the two personalities of Francis Poulenc, a man as devoted to his Catholicism as he was to his gayness, though not necessarily in that order. Poulenc himself is quoted as having said, “You know that I am as sincere in my faith, without any messianic...
I was completely befuddled by the first words on the booklet cover: 'Half Monk' and 'Half Rascal'. Initially I thought of them as a couple of Scandinavian participants in the recording, and it was only when reading Claus Johansen (probably also Scandinavian) on the music itself that I came across Poulenc's remark that 'A critic has said that there are both a monk and a street urchin in me. That...
Layton and the DNVE follow Praulins with Poulenc
The Danish National Vocal Ensemble face some pretty stiff competition with this disc of unaccompanied Poulenc but they do not just hold their own; they sweep a lot of it aside. Under Stephen Layton's perceptive and often inspired direction, they capture the essential dichotomy of Poulenc's writing as encapsulated in the title of the disc, a...