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Passions abound at Easter - chiefly, but not exclusively, Bach's, after the gospel accounts. On Sunday I heard Bach's St Matthew in the Barbican Hall, from Paul McCreesh's Gabrieli Consort and Players; a few days earlier, I'd heard Arvo Part's austere 1982 Passio after St John, performed by the Hilliard Ensemble, Stephen Layton and his Holst Singers, at St John's, Smith Square. Both performances...
St John's is the most direct of the Passions, some would say the most tendentious: a couple of years ago there was a great kerfuffle following Deborah Warner's operatic production of Bach's version at ENO, where the dramatised, Englished narrative made it uncomfortably clear exactly where the evangelist was placing the blame for Jesus's fate. It makes you thankful for the general irreligion of...
This collection of some of Britten’s a cappella choral music is wide-ranging – from the Hymn to the Virgin (1930) composed at the age of 16 to the late cycle of medieval poems, Sacred and Profane (1975) composed shortly before Britten’s death. Along the way we hear the difficult setting of Gerald Manley Hopkins's AMDG (composed in 1939 at the beginning of Britten’s sojourn in America, but not...
A valued possession … highly recommended
Performance *****Sounds *****
Polyphony’s brand of singing, clean as a whistle, rhythmically wonderfully alive, impeccably tuned and voiced, polished yet always fervent, is justly renowned and on this disc, under the direction of Stephen Layton, it serves Britten's a cappella choral music extremely well. The variety here is vast, ranging from the still magical A Hymn to the Virgin, which Britten...
Almost the only criticism I have of this superb programme is that in Sacred and Profane, Britten's late group of settings of early English poems, Polyphony employ the sort of studied `authentic' pronunciation that one associates with the most scholarly of early music specialists. And yet at various points in his career Britten turned to the very different sounds and syntaxes of foreign languages...