The King's Singers: Live at Christmas captures the celebrated vocal sextet in a live performance recorded at Temple Church, London, on 16 January 2026. Spanning nine centuries of music, the programme moves from medieval plainchant and O Antiphons through Renaissance polyphony to beloved modern carols and seasonal pop, including world premiere recordings of newly commissioned arrangements. Throughout the concert, the singers perform from several different areas of the church, creating varied acoustic effects. Contributions from both longstanding collaborators and the singers themselves reflect the group's ongoing commitment to expanding the choral repertoire.

Known for his large-scale compositions, Leonard Bernstein also wrote for his own instrument, the piano. The sequence of four Anniversaries, published between 1944 and 1989, are brief, deftly evocative vignettes written to celebrate his many friends, colleagues and family members. The early Piano Sonata is imbued with youthful self-confidence, and explores certain compositional techniques to which he was to return in more mature works. The rhythmically incisive Music for the Dance No. II is another important early work.

The composer stated that his symphony was about a crisis in faith, an issue that would concern him for life. The biblical Jeremiah preached in Jerusalem some six centuries before Christ, centering his message on religious reform in a time of confused morality. The Prophecy first movement sets the tone of slow, solemn contemplation found throughout the entire work. The scherzo movement, Profanation, gives a feeling of the destruction of Jerusalem during the tumultuous times of the prophet. The final Lamentation is the literal cry of Jeremiah, lamenting the pillaged city. This movement, composed years earlier, captivated initial audiences as the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution were being revealed. One of Bernstein's many works that embrace Jewish themes, the piece was dedicated to Samuel Bernstein, the composer's father, who helped impart his faith to his son. The work uses the Ashkenazic Hebrew pronunciation of the Book of Lamentations. In Jeremiah it is certainly possible to see parallels between the prophet and the young composer/conductor/pianist, taking brave and unpopular positions despite the risk. Not surprisingly, interest in his symphony sprung from various corners. The first performance was conducted by Bernstein with the Pittsburgh Symphony, at the invitation of it's director, Fritz Reiner, on 28th January, 1944. Koussevitzky invited Bernstein to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Jeremiah shortly thereafter, and the New York Philharmonic followed with four performances in the spring. In what was to be one of many whirlwind years for Bernstein, the symphony would win the New York Music Critics Circle Award for 1944.

"Marin Alsop follows up her excellent Samuel Barber series for Naxos with works by her one-time mentor, Leonard Bernstein. For the most part, she and the Bournemouth Symphony deliver the goods. The suite Bernstein fashioned from his lone film score, On the Waterfront, contains some of this composer's most vibrant and involving music, where no section of the orchestra goes under-utilized. Everything in the score clearly stands out under Alsop's eagle eyes and ears, with syncopated rhythms and canonic passages securely aligned and the Bournemouth brass at their assertive best (especially in the final Allegro non troppo section)...The Bournemouth strings come into their own in Chichester Psalms, notably in the third-movement prelude. Alsop's brisk tempos serve the first movement's insouciant asymmetry well, and she makes the third movement's lyrical points through strict dynamic gradations and steady tempos (it's so tempting to milk this music to death!). The chorus is expertly prepared, and the small solo parts are handled as well as they can be. Boy soprano Thomas Kelly's centered pitch and clear diction deserves more than honorable mention. My only complaint about Naxos' wide-ranging sonics is that you can barely understand the words at loud moments--but listeners will find texts and translations are provided. Yes, no one conducts Bernstein like Lenny, but Marin Alsop manages to make this music her own. And that's no small feat."

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

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Bernstein the composer has a champion in Marin Alsop, who decided to become a conductor after hearing him lead the New York Philharmonic when she was 9. On a Naxos disc, she conducts an uplifting performance of his colorful "Chichester Psalms" with the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and Orchestra (of which she was principal conductor from 2002 to 2008). Bernstein described the "Psalms," for which he set Hebrew texts, as the "most B flat majorish tonal piece I’ve ever written." The recording also includes lively renditions of his Three Dance Episodes from "On the Town" (a musical theater piece) and the Symphonic Suite from "On the Waterfront," which uses material (including some that was cut) from his 1954 film score.

--Vivien Schweitzer, New York Times

Music from Symphony No. 1, "Jeremiah"; Symphony No. 2, "Age of Anxiety"; Symphony No. 3, "Kaddish"; Chichester Psalms for Chorus and Orchestra ; songs from on the Town; Peter Pan; Fancy Free and Candide ; the original Broadway recording of West Side Story, and more!

Track listings include: "Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 IV. Finale: Allegro con fuoco " "Stravinsky: Suite from "The Firebird" (1919 version) Finale Disc 2: "Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E- flat Major, KV 543 "Copland: El salon Mexico" Disc 3: "Haydn: Missa in tempore belli in c major (Mass in Time of War) Hob. XXII: 9" "Sousa: Semper fidelis" "Barber: Adagio for Strings."

Track Listing
1. Overture
2. Ladies Who Lunch, The
3. He Tossed a Coin
4. Two by Two
5. I Want to Be Happy
6. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup
7. Lucky to Be Me
8. Send in the Clowns
9. I'm Always Chasing Rainbows
10. Over Here!
11. What I Did For Love
12. Mack the Knife
13. Tomorrow
14. Fifty Per Cent
15. Come Follow the Band
16. Folies Bergere

This is not just an anthology which works—it's a wow!

This is the sixteenth gala of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation—''a look at an era just gone by'', as conductor James Conlon calls it—recorded live before an enthusiastic audience. It starts with a great lift-off: America the Beautiful (no mention of its composer Samuel Augustus Ward, whose hymn is treated to a showbiz arrangement) sung by Leontyne Price. At the age of 63 she can still summon enough patriotic fervour to make non-Americans want to apply for citizenship papers on the spot! And she isn't the oldest performer by any means. Robert Merrill is ten years her senior and delivers Weill's ''September Song'' touchingly but with a maddening tendency to anticipate the beat.

Weill is also represented by the ecstatic virtuosity of the Ice-Cream Sextet from Street Scene, still fresh in one's memory from the ENO performances in London and the two recordings now available on Decca and TER. Then there are two settings of William Blake's ''Tiger! Tiger! burning bright'' (''Songs of Experience''). Virgil Thomson set the poem twice: this is the second of his Five Songs from William Blake written in 1951, but it is William Bolcom who brings the house down with his version for chanting chorus backed by a variety of orchestral percussion.

One of the most moving performances is Karen Holvik in Stephen Foster's immaculate Ah! May the red rose live alway, with piano (Steven Blier). More calculating, but equally polished nostalgia comes from Barber, especially ''Must the winter come so soon'' from Vanessa, hauntingly sung by Frederica von Stade, recently admired for her Melisande at Covent Garden. But also ''Give me my robe'' from Barber's Anthony and Cleopatra, sung with equal poignancy by Carol Vaness.

Tatiana Troyanos sings Copland's setting of Robert Lowry's ''At the river'' with impressive, quiet dignity. Bernstein is the only composer who gets in three times—the Collegiate Chorale is on form for the first of the Chichester Psalms; Jerry Hadley sings ''Maria''; and there's an ensemble from Candide. Finally, in case you didn't sign on for US citizenship, Marilyn Horne gives a truly commanding performance of Berlin's classic God bless America. This is not just an anthology which works—it's a wow!

-- Peter Dickinson, Gramophone [6/1993]

The ICA Classics Legacy series presents a collection of historical performances by some of the world's greatest artists. These performances are released on DVD for the first time, incorporating rare archive footage that has been expertly and lovingly restored. 'Luckily for all of us, it wasn't enough for Leonard Bernstein to compose music and conduct orchestras. He felt equally compelled to talk about music - to try and explain what made it tick, what made it good, and what made it affect US in all the ways that music does. The other piece of good luck was that Leonard Bernstein and television came along at the same time. They were born for each other.' (Jamie Bernstein), the films on this DVD are taken from the 'Symphonic Twilight' series of TV programs made in the mid-Sixties that were the brainchild of Humphrey Burton, then the newly appointed Head of Music and Arts Programs for the BBC. In his booklet notes for this DVD, Burton reveals himself to have been instrumental in bringing Bernstein the conductor to the wider British public, who knew him foremost as the composer of West Side Story. In 1965 Burton persuaded Bernstein to conduct the LSO at the Royal Albert Hall and the resulting Mahler 8 was a spectacular occasion, broadcast to the nation. The following year, they put together these programs, filmed specifically for the new television audience. The works Bernstein chose to record are twentieth-century orchestral masterpieces, for which he is known to be a champion. His recordings of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony for CBS Records and Deutsche Grammophon were acclaimed by critics worldwide, and his interpretation of the Rite of Spring in 1959 elicited an enthusiastic 'Wow!' from Stravinsky himself! They are accompanied on this DVD by an in-depth interview, given here as a bonus and subtitled in French and German.

BERNSTEIN West Side Story: Symphonic Dances. Trouble in Tahiti 1 & • Ulf Schirmer, cond; Kim Criswell ( Dinah ); 1 Rodney Gilfry ( Sam ); 1 Marlene Grimson ( Trio sop ); 1 Adrian Dwyer ( Trio ten ); 1 Ronan Collett ( Trio bar ); 1 Munich RO • BR 719003 (77:43 Text and Translation) Live: Munich 10/12/2008


& German interview with Ulf Schirmer


I have not generally been impressed with German orchestral performances of distinctly American scores such as these by Leonard Bernstein—heavily dependent on Latin dance rhythms and jazz inflections, having found too many of them stiff and uncomfortable with the idiom. I rather imagine that Viennese listeners have a similar reaction when an American orchestra and conductor perform Johann Strauss. Like the subtle inflections of language, there are some things one just absorbs from the culture that are hard to master otherwise.


So it proves here, especially in the “Symphonic Dances.” The percussion get the rhythms, and the brass have the feel as well, though the trumpets seem reluctant to wail with sufficient abandon, but generally, the woodwinds just can’t quite bring themselves to let lose in the long stretches of exuberance, and the strings are too polite by half. Add to that Ulf Schirmer’s tendency to relax momentum in the more lyrical sections—something Bernstein never did—and you have a performance that is a little too pokerfaced to take flight. It is not bad by any means—Schirmer often generates a good deal of energy and excitement—but it is simply not competitive with more idiomatic performances by the composer and others.


Some of that same orchestral stiffness infects the performance of Bernstein’s heavily ironic, autobiographical one-act opera, Trouble in Tahiti —the characters almost certainly represent Bernstein’s mismatched parents, Jennie and Sam—but this performance is harder to pass over. First of all, there are not a lot of recordings around, and more important, these singers have the style to make it work. The issue raised by this interpretation is one of genre: is it opera or is it musical theater? While most performances are cast with classically trained singers who can act, this recording straddles the fence by using an operatic baritone and a Broadway mezzo. (They also appeared in Simon Rattle’s 1999 EMI Wonderful Town .) Both are very fine: Gilfry, with his virile, flexible instrument, is a perfect self-absorbed and egotistical Sam, and Criswell, a singer with a vibrant and colorful voice, though rather limited on top for “I was standing in a garden,” is an emotionally fragile and angry Dinah. Their voices never blend, but one has to wonder if the stylistic contrast is an interpretive choice. Certainly, even if the combination gives less aural pleasure than two matched operatic voices might, it makes some sense for the antagonistic characters. And the choice of Criswell, a brilliant actress, is vindicated by an absolutely stunning performance of the show-stopping, musical theater-style “What a movie!” The Greek-chorus jazz vocal trio is classy with a reasonable sense of swing, and though the balance between the voices is not always ideal, they create just the right balance of satire and empathy.


In the end though, effective as this performance is, it must still take second place to the 1973 Bernstein-led performance on Sony 60969: very stylish and expressive, with excellent soloists and a perfect trio. There are other performances on CD: the student-cast performance by the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater on Newport Classic 85641 is quite good, and the 2006 Calliope recording (9391) in accented English with French performers, is an interesting novelty: urbane and very coolly jazzy. But once you have the Bernstein CD, Gilfry and Criswell make this new release an ideal supplement.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames