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The Prom the night before brought another major premiere (though not a BBC commission). This was Colin Matthews’s No Man’s Land, set to a text by Christopher Reid, in which we encounter two dead soldiers in the trenches of the first world war. A feeling of remembrance is everywhere in this piece, not least because it so strongly recalls Britten’s War Requiem with its two soldiers walking “...
Many years ago, in what might be seen as an extreme form of “authenticity”, I sang in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem that purported to include only the music that Mozart himself wrote. It was a strange evening, and obviously a rather shorter one than we are accustomed to, ending as it did in mid-air on a dominant chord eight bars into the Lacrimosa.
A true Mozart-only performance would...
Musical memorials take many forms, as Sunday night's Prom elegantly demonstrated. A concert dedicated to Richard Hickox, whose sudden death in 2008 robbed English music of one of its most persuasive champions, the evening reflected the conductor's legacy and tastes, but also explored the broader question of how we bear witness culturally, whether to a life, a death, or - in the case of the First...
It was Richard Hickox who, with a characteristically ebullient phone call in 2008, just three days before his untimely death, commissioned Colin Matthews's latest piece from him.
The work, No Man's Land, was written in his memory and given its world premiere by Hickox's old orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia, under Stephen Layton.
But it was also the death of one of the composer's...
This release focuses on Russian composers from the early 20th-century – including some émigré composers – who were linked through the famous pre-Revolutionary Moscow Synodal School of church singing. The comprehensive notes give an excellent background to the composers, who included Chesnokov, Gretchaninov and Viktor Kalinnikov. Though their styles diverge, the extraordinary sonority of the...
This album is a dual celebration of sorts; American choral music coming into its own as a distinct and vibrant force particularly in the last couple of decades; and its emergence as a powerful voice on the British cultural scene as well. 20 years ago it would be difficult to imagine this choir recording this music; the great British tradition was reserved for the great English choral music,...