Lennox in Paris
Given some of the nonsense handed out to customers as liner notes by big companies recently, it is a relief to have a full and sensible booklet for this issue from the small Willowhayne label…
An Old Belief
The album takes its title from the fourth of Parry’s Songs of Farewell. This is one of those programmes that I suspect works wonderfully in concert but feels too fractured to hang together on disc. There is logic, in that it is the latest edition of the group’s choral pilgrimage that they tour round England’s cathedrals, but it perhaps is best thought of as a souvenir of that progress…
Tormento d’Amore – Arias
As one would expect from a historian of Bostridge’s calibre this is a superbly constructed survey of the way the Venetian operatic style of the early 17th century, developed by Cavalli, spread South to Naples, was followed and adapted there, and came back to Venice reinforced in the 18th…
Why Do The Nations…?
The title, familiar from Handel’s Messiah, continues of course. Why do all the nations rage so furiously together? And that is the point. Stephen Powell’s tour du monde is a gesture of defiance against international conflict, a celebration of the riches of art song, wherever one calls home…
Crépuscule
The collection, taking its overall title from William Alwyn’s Crépuscule, covers exactly a century of composition for this rarefied group of instruments (sometimes minus the viola): from Arnold Bax’s very Ravelian Elegiac Trio from 1916 to Paul Patterson’s engaging Canonic Lullaby from 2016, which was premiered by Halnan and Wright in this version (flute replacing oboe)…
De Profundis Clamavi
Only the works by the famous composers, Britten, Bridge and Parry in this set have been recorded before so Honeybourne’s selection is bound to be a series of discoveries. EM Records is pursuing its task of exploring the attic of English music with diligence…