Reviews

You hear about huge advance orders for the latest CD by the biggest, hottest pop superstar, or for the most fashionably hip tell-all book--but when the buzz is about a CD of classical choral music? Yes, there have been big successes by vocal groups during the last decade or two – Anonymous 4, the King's Singers, the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, the Tallis Scholars, the Bulgarian women's...
For months I've been driving around entranced, listening to Cloudburst, a stunning CD from British choral group Polyphony. All of the songs on the disc are by 30 something American composer Eric Whitacre, who has a way of contracting and expanding chords with carefully crafted dissonance and resolution. Members of Polyphony, directed by Stephen Layton, sing of sleep, love, dreams, passion, and...
A lifetime of listening to choral music had not prepared me for such lush harmonies—a cappella voices perfectly tuned and blended. This was my first encounter with Polyphony, possibly the best small (25 or so) professional chorus in the world. Polyphony is from Britain, where choral singing is a national fetish. Since their formation in 1986 by conductor Stephen Layton, they have amassed an...
Right. Stop making the coffee: leave the washing for two minutes, muzzle your children, pull over to the side of the road and listen to this. Whitacre – I thank You God This is the music of Eric Whitacre and if you haven’t heard about him you’re surely about to in a big way and there could be no better place to start than a new recording entitled CLOUDBURST dedicated entirely to his choral works...