Although most widely remembered for his operettas in partnership with W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan was the most famous of all British composers of the nineteenth century. He was revered as a composer of oratorios, and was urged by Queen Victoria to compose a grand opera. The result, Ivanhoe, achieved 155 consecutive performances (in an opera house especially built for it). Achieving equal success in his lifetime, his substantial legacy of songs fell into neglect in the twentieth century, but as this album demonstrates Sullivan's endlessly fertile melodic gifts withstand comparison with those of any other song composer. David Owen Norris and his quartet of outstanding young British singers deliver this fascinating programme with terrific style and panache.

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Choral Performance!

The wonderful Conspirare chamber choir, known for its interpretive depth and other-worldly sonic lushness, offers another of its captivating programs — this time joined by three superb guitar quartets — in a program remarkably relevant for our time. The choir is joined by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, the Texas Guitar Quartet, the Austin Guitar Quartet, and cellist Douglas Harvey for this release featuring compositions by Reena Esmail, Craig Hella Johnson, Nico Muhly, and Kile Smith. Conspirare is a virtuoso choir. The Grammy-winning ensemble comprises distinctive solo artists who are also committed to the highest level of ensemble performance. These professional singers travel to Austin from around the country to perform together, providing their audiences with a rare level of choral music making.

REVIEW:

Conspirare’s new recording featuring the Austin-based choral group and three guitar quartets bookends impressive large-scale works by Nico Muhly and Kile Smith with small jewels by Reena Esmail and founding conductor Craig Hella Johnson.

Smith’s The Dawn’s Early Light features only one guitar quartet but the most beautiful texts, from Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s 1883 autobiography, one of the earliest books by a Native American woman.

The participation of three guitar quartets from LA and Texas adds texture and warmth to Muhly’s How Little You Are, a thoughtful 40-minute meditation on the words of American pioneer women in the 19th century, its lovely solos sung by Estelí Gomez.

Esmail’s When the Guitar—inspired by a 14th-century Persian lyric, ‘When the guitar can forgive the past, it starts singing’—uses the intriguing sounds of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet as one of the layers of a fabulous wrap for the chorus. Johnson’s serene The Song That I Came to Sing, which sets a Rabindranath Tagore poem for cello and treble voices, was composed as a framing piece for the program ‘which would reflect aspects of unfulfilled purpose and a longing for intimacy with the Divine’.

-- Gramophone

The Conspirare chamber choir, known for its interpretive depth and otherworldly sonic lushness, offers another of its captivating programs—this time joined by three superb guitar quartets—in a program remarkably relevant for our time. Conspirare’s debut album on Delos, The Hope of Loving, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance in 2020. Here, the combination of guitar quartet and chorus is so successful that one wonders why more composers have not written for it. The works on this album were written by four of America’s greatest living composers: Nico Muhly, Reena Esmail, Kile Smith, and Craig Hella Johnson.

-- WFMT Chicago

This exceptional recording gathers the finest young vocal talents in a unique program of songs by Sullivan, many of them very rarely recorded. Currently widely acclaimed for key operatic title roles in the UK and abroad, the "deeply touching, outstanding" (The Guardian)soprano Mary Bevan, the "elegant yet intense, impeccable" (The Guardian) tenor Ben Johnson, and the "increasingly impressive" (The Financial Times) bass-baritone Ashley Riches - who here appears on Chandos for the first time - span fifty years of Arthur Sullivan's large non-operatic vocal output. They are accompanied by the UK pianist David Owen Norris, who regularly appears in highly praised concerto performances at the BBC Proms. This album continues to celebrate the Shakespeare anniversary but also presents a wide variety of poets, drawing on texts from a vast range of sources, through the voices of today's greatest rising stars.

Emma Johnson is one of the few clarinetists to have established a busy career as a solo performer which has taken her to major European, American and Asian venues as well as to Africa and Australasia. She is one of the UK’s biggest selling classical artists, having sold over half a million albums worldwide. Her recent recording of sonatas by Brahms and Mendelssohn with John Leneham was described as definitive and triumphant. “The great thing about the clarinet is it can take you anywhere- any country, any style, any era- and accordingly Clarinet Goes To Town journeys from Brazil to China encompassing styles from Classical to jazz. It’s basically me letting my hair down with my favorite musicians in party pieces we’ve honed in concert over the past few years.” (Emma Johnson)

Some of the UK’s best singers come together for this album, which is the first release in a series profiling the complete songs of Gabriel Faure. Pianist Malcolm Martineau heads up this project, performing beautifully. This release follows his critically acclaimed series of The Complete Poulenc Songs. Vocalists featured on this release include Lorna Anderson, Nigel Cliffe, Ann Murray, John Chest, and more.