Permutations is a new work by Freya Waley-Cohen, commissioned as part of a Aldeburgh Festival’s 2017 season and exploring the relationship between architecture and music. The music for six recorded violins, performed by Tamsin Waley-Cohen (Freya’s sister), has been composed in parallel with the design of six chambers, each housing one violin part. The chambers are adaptable, so that each audience member creates their own piece by the path they take through the space and the way they interact with the chambers. It is as if the structure was itself an instrument and the listener, their own performer. Born in London in 1986, Tamsin Waley-Cohen enjoys an adventurous and varied career. In addition to concerts with the Royal Philharmonic, London Philharmonic and BBC orchestras, amongst others, she has been associate artist with the Orchestra of the Swan and works with conductors including Andrew Litton and Tamás Vásáry. She enjoys a duo partnership with Huw Watkins, whose Concertino she premiered, and together they have recorded for Champs Hill and Signum Records, for whom she is a Signum Classics Artist. In 2016-2017 she will be a recipient of the ECHO Rising Stars Awards. She studied at the Royal College of Music and her teachers included Itzhak Rashkovsky, Ruggiero Ricci, and András Keller. Freya Waley-Cohen’s music has been performed by the Manson Ensemble at the Royal Academy of Music, conducted by Oliver Knussen, the Orchestra of the Swan, conducted by David Curtis, CHROMA ensemble, The Hermes Experiment, Reverie Choir, Richard Watkins, Huw Watkins and others, at venues including the Sage Gateshead, Spitalfields Festival, The Ryedale Festival, The British Film Institute, Snape Maltings Aldeburgh, Dartington, The National Portrait Gallery, and Kew Gardens.
This programme explores that vast twentieth-century secular English choral repertoire which goes under the generic title ‘partsongs’. It is an extraordinarily rich repertoire to which almost all the famous composers contributed. Buried amongst vast quantities of slightly twee pastoralism – the much-derided “cow-pat” school – are to be found many settings of glorious poetry, forming a corpus of sublime twentieth-century madrigals at least as fine as their famous renaissance forebears. However, this programme has another particular theme: how poets and composers reflect upon the natural world as a metaphor for our own emotional experience. At the heart of this programme is the complex relationship between man and nature, the bitter-sweetness of a radiant and beautiful dawn creating the same unbearable sadness of a ravishing song, and both with intimations of mortality.
Greensleeves: Folk Music of the British Isles / Monks, Armonico Consort
Signum Classics
CD · 1 disc
$19.99Jun 10, 2016
This new release is a celebration of the music of the British Isles. Spanning the breadth and width of the Isles, this is some of the most beautiful folk music ever written. The arrangements by Geoffrey Webber and Toby Young are mesmerizing. Performing these songs is the Armonico Consort, directed by Christopher Monks.
Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending, Violin Concerto; Elgar / Waley-Cohen
Signum Classics
CD · 1 disc
$19.99Oct 14, 2014
British-violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen – described by the late Ruggiero Ricci following a masterclass as the “most exceptionally gifted young violinist I have ever encountered” – adds to her prodigious reputation with a new disc of timeless works for strings by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar. Joined again by the Orchestra of the Swan under David Curtis, the centerpiece of the program is a performance of Vaughan Williams’ enchanting The Lark Ascending. Of her previous disc: “Waley-Cohen makes the utmost of [the D minor Concerto’s] innocent, songful lyricism...” The Observer
Oliver Davis: Flight / Peacock, Bateman, London Symphony Orchestra
Signum Classics
CD · 1 disc
$19.99Apr 14, 2015
Flight is a new album of works from British composer Oliver Davis (b.1972), composed for and in collaboration with violinist Kerenza Peacock. Flight captures the spirit of movement and energy present in many of Davis’s compositions. On disc, Kerenza performs alongside the London Symphony under conductor Paul Bateman. Since graduating Royal Academy of Music, London in 1994, Mr. Davis has composed and produced numerous albums, soundtracks, concertos and television scores while working with all the major London orchestras and the Royal Ballet, among other arts groups and organizations.
PURCELL Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem. To the Hills and Vales. By the Beauteous Softness Mix’d with Majesty. O God, Thou art my God. How Happy the Lover. What Power Thou Art. Behold, O Mightiest of Gods. My Heart is Inditing of a Good Matter. Bid the Virtues. Hail! Bright Cecilia. Strike the Viol. Thou Knowest Lord the Secrets of Our Hearts. Fairest Isle. Full Fathom Five • Voces8; Les Inventions; Andrea Haines, Emily Dickens (s); Barnaby Smith (ct); Samuel Dressel (t); Dingle Yandell (bs) • SIGNUM 2975 (70:18)
Voces8 is an (of course) eight-member group whose repertoire ranges from “Renaissance polyphony to unique jazz and pop arrangements.” Here they are joined with the distinguished French-based instrumental group Les Inventions. Together they have put together a kind of anthology of Purcell’s music that they charmingly describe as a stroll through his world. It’s more than that. We hear a particularly lovely rendition by the voices of Purcell’s unaccompanied dirge Thou Knowest, Lord, a gracious performance by countertenor Barnaby Smith of Purcell’s praise for Queen Mary, By Beauteous Softness Mix’d with Majesty (with a text by the oft-reviled Thomas Shadwell), and a comical What Power Thou Art. In this piece, nicknamed The Cold Song, bass Dingle Yandell impersonates the spirit of Britain being reluctantly awakened from a frosty slumber. One can virtually hear his teeth chatter. The choral pieces are just as effective, and the instrumental playing, including the oboe obbligato in Bid the Virtues, is lovely as well. There is spirit here when it is called for, and pathos as well. Although such definitive pieces as “Dido’s Lament” are not here, this collection would be an excellent introduction to Purcell as a reminder of his range for those whose know him well.
Talbot: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Fool's Paradise / Austin, RPO
Signum Classics
CD · 1 disc
$19.99Mar 01, 2013
TALBOT Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Suite. Fool’s Paradise • Christopher Austin, cond; Royal PO • SIGNUM 327 (67:12)
James Reel in his Fanfare 34:5 review of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ballet on DVD hailed, as have most critics, Joby Talbot’s score as a significant triumph. I could not agree more with Reel’s assessment, and was particularly struck by his wish that Talbot had been asked to write the scores to those Harry Potter movies which John Williams had been unable to undertake. I had a similar thought as I listened to this release for the first time. Talbot’s work only peripherally sounds like Williams’s scoring for that franchise, but magic, and yearning, and menace, and whimsy (to use Reel’s descriptors) are qualities of both Harry’s and Alice’s story, and Talbot captures these qualities with skill equal to that of the illustrious American composer.
Alice was the first full-length ballet commissioned by the Royal Ballet in almost 20 years, and this almost 40-minute suite encompasses but a third of the two-hour score. It uses the same large orchestra with its huge tuned percussion section and four amplified women’s voices, and, while it follows its own music-driven dramatic arc, it is well devised to demonstrate the range of the whole. One might regret the exclusion of the caterpillar’s sensuous Indian music, which, while less distinctive than say the opening bitonal ticking-clock motif which reappears throughout the work, is still delightfully flavorful. And the contrapuntal tapping of the Mad Hatter at the tea party is certainly an integral part and should have been included here. Still that is quibbling. Talbot wisely avoids the riotous Rose Adagio parody, which depends on the visual antics, but does include the Red Queen’s manic Tango and The Croquet Match with her scordatura solo violin theme. Alice’s solo, Alice Alone, provides an expressive center to the suite, and the Cheshire Cat grins most mysteriously. Talbot ends the suite with the act I finale: the exuberance of the waltz for the Living Flowers and the innocent longing of the pas de deux for Alice and her Knave of Hearts.
The theme of longing is continued in Fool’s Paradise, another dance collaboration with Wheeldon. The score is based on Talbot’s 2002 The Dying Swan, written for piano trio to accompany the 1917 Evgenii Bauer film of the same name. The film tells the story of a ballerina admired, painted, and then strangled by a crazed artist. Wheeldon takes this in a completely different direction, assisted by Talbot’s rich orchestration for strings and piano, to suggest the shadowy atmosphere of the fairy-inhabited Athenian forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The score, with its popular and classical inspirations, develops slowly over ostinatos in the manner of the minimalists. It is perhaps less compelling on its own than when accompanying the dancers, but is still lovely in the abstract, and so hauntingly evocative that it should not be hard to conjure one’s own visuals if the need is felt.
Friend, frequent collaborator, and conductor Christopher Austin did much of the orchestration of the Alice score, suggesting that he should know the music as well as anyone. So it proves here, supported by a Royal Philharmonic Orchestra exceedingly sensitive to the many demands of both scores. There are moments in fact, as in Alice’s solo, where Austin finds even more poignancy and ecstasy than Barry Wordsworth does in the fine video version. The engineering is first-rate and the program notes and pictures most supportive. This is a marvelous supplement to the video of the ballet, or the perfect introduction to Joby Talbot’s music for those uninterested in ballet…though given a chance Wheeldon and Talbot might just cure that.
MENDELSSOHN Elijah • Paul McCreesh, cond; Rosemary Joshua (sop); Sarah Connolly (mez); Robert Murray (ten); Simon Keenlyside (bar); Jonty Ward (tr); Gabrieli Consort; Gabrieli Players; Wroc?aw P Ch; Chetham’s C Ch; North East Youth Ch; Taplow Youth Ch; Ulster Youth C Ch; William Whitehead (org) • SIGNUM SIGCD 300 (2 CDs: 135:58)
Period-performance practice is often loosely associated with smallish forces—but it doesn’t need to be; and although McCreesh happily claims responsibility for the first recording of St. Matthew Passion using a one-to-a-part vocal contingent, he’s also been interested in reproducing the blockbusters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries as they were first heard, with big choruses and surprisingly large period-instrument orchestras. He’s already given us The Creation and the Berlioz Requiem in recordings that approximate the forces of their premieres; now we get a period Elijah that’s modeled on the Birmingham first performance of 1846. What precisely does this mean? For the solo numbers, we have a hefty, but hardly unusual orchestral group. But to accompany the nearly 300-voice chorus, the strings are pumped up by half; woodwinds, trumpets, and drums are doubled; the ophicleide is tripled; and three serpents are thrown into the mix. The result is an orchestra of well more than a hundred. There are other big Elijahs out there, of course, but I suspect that there are none on quite this scale. I’ve heard the Mahler Eighth performed by a smaller crowd.
What’s the benefit, besides increased volume in the climaxes? Well, increased volume is not to be sneered at, but there’s a lot more. The alterations in orchestral size provide additional tonal and emotional variety; the period instruments (which include slide trumpets) provide unusual bursts of color (listen, for example to the tangy sting of the horn stabs in “Though thousands languish” or the gleam of the brass tone in “Baal, we cry to thee”). Most important, though, there’s an audible and striking shift in tonal balance. People often think of Mendelssohn’s music as light, with a treble tilt—and that’s true, say, of the Fourth Symphony or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But it’s certainly not the case with this Elijah: McCreesh’s performance gives prominence to the bass lines—in part by the use of serpents to double the choral basses, in part by the presence of the extra ophicleides (one of which is a contrabass ophicleide, apparently the only one that still exists), in part by the use of the Birmingham organ (unfortunately dubbed in, but at least very effectively done) with its floor rattling “Grand Ophicleide” stop, in part by the use of so-called “Tower drums” (huge instruments that are in some cases tuned an octave lower). I suspect you’ve never heard the pedal point under the first choral entry so clearly; I suspect you’ve never heard “Thanks be to God!” played with such inevitable and overpowering accumulation of orchestral weight, and never heard it conclude with such depth of sound; I suspect you’ve never heard Elijah’s ascent into heaven or the final fugue thrown forth with such solidity. You might expect the weight to drag the music down; but despite the size and disposition of his forces, McCreesh manages to duplicate the energy and rhythmic vitality of the best small-group performances. If you think of Elijah as “Victorian”—in the loose sense of stodgy or sanctimonious—you’ll be disabused.
Not surprisingly, McCreesh offers an interpretation that stresses the dramatic. Tempos are generally mainstream, although he does resist the temptation to slow down in such moments as “He watching over Israel,” which can easily turn saccharine. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s unsubtle, much less that it lacks passages of exquisite beauty—listen to the glow in the second half of “Yet doth the Lord see it not” or the magic of the double quartet in “For He shall give His Angels charge” or the sweetness of “Blessed are the men who fear Him.” Still, you’re liable to remember this most for its unparalleled outbursts of power—for the huge sound of pleading on the first choral entry, for the overwhelming impact of the silences after “Hear and answer!,” for the shocking arrival of the fire from heaven (“Oh thou who makest”), for the sense of vastness of “Go, return upon thy way.”
As for the title role: If you’re looking for tender authority as Elijah cures the widow’s son, Keenlyside is your man; if, on the other hand, you’re looking for sheer venom as Elijah calls for the murder of the prophets of Baal, then Keenlyside is also your man. This is, simply put, a superbly rich characterization, one that captures, in glorious voice, all the expressive swings of the part. For a quick tour, try the handling of the tricky emotional terrain in “It is enough.”
The other soloists are all excellent: I especially appreciated Rosemary Joshua’s fiery purpose in “What have I to do with thee?” The chorus, which combines singers from Wroc?aw and from Britain, has a lot of younger voices: They sing with freshness, enthusiasm, and no sign of inexperience. The eight who have been picked out for the double quartet—and who are also called forth, in various combinations, for “Cast thy burden,” “Lift thine eyes,” and “Holy, holy, holy”—blend exquisitely. The orchestra is magnificent, too, and balances between soloists, orchestra, and chorus are consistently well judged.
Although I wish (as I did with their Berlioz Requiem) that we had been given a surround-sound version of this performance, the stereo engineering is first class. When you go to your shelf for a recording to demonstrate your new subwoofer, you’re not usually apt to pass by Mahler to reach for Mendelssohn; but this is surely an ideal release for that purpose. As with the Berlioz, it comes in a hard-cover book (fortunately, CD-sized, so it fits on your shelves) with detailed notes, full text, and plenty of photographs. One textual point: Mendelssohn revised the work significantly for the second performance, and McCreesh gives us the final version (with a bit of light editing to the words). This is clearly the right choice, and clearly the Elijah of choice. Want List material.
Tenebrae's latest disc on Signum sees their return to the repertoire of Russian composer Alexander Levine. The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is Levine's most significant large-scale religious work to date. Inspired by the humility and humanity of the murdered Russian priest (and friend of Levine) Fr. Alexander Men and composed over a three-month period of spiritual immersion, research and contemplation (similar to that described by his great forebears Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov), the work traces a continuous spiritual growth towards the central point of the Liturgy - the Holy Communion.
With a title inspired by Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ (the opening scenes of which were filmed on the church steps), ‘Midnight at St Etienne du Mont’ explores the music of Duruflé, who was Titular Organist there from 1929 until his death in 1986. As well as Durufulé’s own Suite Op. 5, at the centre of the programme is the premiere recording of David Briggs’ Le Tombeau de Duruflé – a brilliant work built on plainsong themes that Duruflé so loved himself. British-Australian organist and choral conductor Joseph Nolan has been hailed by ABC Classic FM as “an extraordinary musician”, BBC Radio 3 CD Review as a “virtuoso”, and Limelight Magazine, Australia as a “remarkable musician”. In 2016 he was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for services to French music
Dance is the final part of a triology of albums following Flight and SEasons. This project started as a concept album, using the title as the inspiration for the works. Though several of the works embrace the composer's background collaborations in ballet, there are other works influenced by violinist Kerenza Peacock's connection with folk music.
Swiss guitarist Christoph Denoth explores the enchanting lute music of JohnDowland using his own arrangements made from Dowland’s original handwritten scores. + “Dowland, the melancholic poet of the lute, is free of any instrumental limitation. The melodic, contrapuntal and harmonic approach of his music is both wondrous and unique. Its expression is one of noble sadness, melancholy and genuine beauty. - Christoph Denoth
“I regard The Veil of the Temple as the supreme achievement of my life and the most important work that I have ever composed.” -- Sir John Tavener
Signum Records re-releases the landmark recording of Sir John Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple. This 2-CD set captures the concert version of this 8-hour work, composed to last through the night until dawn in the manner of the grand vigils of the Orthodox Church. Combining the psalms of a number of different religious traditions, Tavener skillfully blends together a work that is truly all-encompassing in its scale and spiritual fervor. Originally released on RCA, 2003.
High Flight - Choral Music By Whitacre, Laurdisen, Chilcott / King's Singers
Signum Classics
CD · 1 disc
$19.99Jan 01, 2011
A must-have for choral-aficionados everywhere that sees perhaps the world's finest a cappella ensemble The King's Singers join forces with The Concordia Choir - one of the USA's best collegiate groups - to perform works by choral composers Eric Whitacre, Bob Chilcott and Morten Lauridsen. One of the world's most celebrated ensembles, The King's Singers have a packed schedule of concerts, recordings, media and education work that spans the globe. Championing the work of young and established composers, they remain consummate entertainers; a class-act with a delightfully British wit. From Gesualdo and György Ligeti to Michael Bublé, The King's Singers are instantly recognisable for their spot-on intonation, their impeccable vocal blend, the flawless articulation of the text and incisive timing. The Concordia Choir of Moorhead, Minnesota is one of America's finest a cappella choirs. Since 1920, the 72-voice choir has performed in nearly every major hall including Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center and has taken numerous international tours. The Choir is broadcast throughout the United States on public radio stations and on television via its Emmy-award winning Concordia Christmas Concert.
" ...an engrossing concept album about water, evoked in its various elemental states across a five-part suite bookended with a brief orchestral torrent supplanted by the resonant ringing of Tibetan temple bowls.” The Independent ****
Tide Harmonic is a new work for small ensemble by the contemporary British composer Joby Talbot. With a compositional aesthetic that threads through his classical and concert works, this disc was born out of a collaboration with choreographer Carolyn Carlson originally entitled Eau. A piece for small ensemble of string quartet, percussion, harp and keyboards (celesta, piano and harmonium), Tide Harmonic is described by its composer as: “… a kind of water symphony that, rather than constructing a poetic or narrative programme inspired by man’s relationship with water, instead focuses on the substance itself, the forces that act upon it, and the energy that flows through and from it”.
This is Signum’s second disc of Talbot’s work, and comes 5 years after Path of Mircales (SIGCD078) with the professional chamber choir Tenebrae:
"From it's opening eerie rising vocal glissando (A Tawainese singing effect called pasiputput) for the gentlemen of Nigel Short's Tenebrae, to the final distribution of the pilgrims having reached Finisterre ... Path of Miracles is little short of a musical miracle in itself. I would go so far as to suggest that this is to the first decade of the 21st century what Arvo Pärt's Passio was twenty years earlier" ClassicalSource.com
