Signum
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Alec Roth: Sometime I Sing
Music for Voice and Guitar
Mark Padmore (tenor) & Morgan Szymanski (guitar)
Light-footed, lyrical, Roth's settings range from Thomas Wyatt to Vikram Seth. They suit Szymanski's elegant guitar and Padmore's refined tenor, but devitalise folksongs like Scarborough Fair. —
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[Nuages gris] is music that has often been said to point to the future and Despax taps into its untethered, questing nature. But the album culminates with his masterpiece from 30 years earlier,... —
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The ensemble’s warm, smooth timbre immediately wins you over, especially in this resonant acoustic, and there are some beautiful pieces; Alberto Cortez’s Camina Siempre Adelante is an especially... —
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In Chains of Gold: The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem, Volume 3
‘Ah, His Glory!’: Anthems of Praise, Prayer and Remembrance
Magdalena Consort, Fretwork, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, Silas Wollston (organ)
In a nutshell, the transformed vocality, scale and rhetoric of the music-making is far closer to Italianate madrigals than ethereal choral balm. —
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These are decent, honest performances… —
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All Things Are Quite Silent
The Pembroke College Girls’ Choir, The Chapel Choir of Pembroke College, Cambridge, The Pembroke College Girls' Choir, Anna Lapwood
Rheinberger’s Abendlied is delivered with sumptuous, all-embracing delectation...At a single sitting, though, across the disc the choirs’ biggest asset – a malleable, velvety smoothness – turns... —
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On the streets and in the sky (Works by Jonathan Dove)
Charles Owen (piano), Katya Apekisheva (piano), Philippe Sly (baritone), Sacconi Quartet
On the streets and in the sky is a meditation on the pandemic and lockdown when anxieties proliferated...With a clean, bright and incisive urgency, the Sacconis earth the resolute purposefulness... —
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The atmosphere is intimate and confiding; the music presented simply with minimal ornament. Occasionally the long lines of the slower songs can bring a certain smoothing-out of the text, but... —
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How Are the Mighty Fallen: Choral Music By Giovanni Bononcini
The Choir of Queen's College, Oxford, Elizabeth Nurse (mezzo-soprano), Colin Danskin (tenor), Daniel Tate (bass-baritone), Esther Lay (mezzo-soprano), Helen Charlston (vocalist), Rowan Pierce (soprano), Giles Underwood (bass-baritone), Guy Cutting (tenor), The Choir of the Queen's College Oxford,...
Concise choruses are sung with a sure sense of harmonic shaping and immaculate diction, although Bononcini’s setting concentrates primarily on movements designed for soloists. —
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this Advent showcase features conductors Andrew Nethsingha and George Herbert and, fascinatingly, three iterations of the choir, with and without female voices – and though the performances... —
