All your plum puddings at once… lustily sung and heartily played, this CD of traditional carols old and new includes all the Christmas ‘standards’ as well as the delectable offerings of John Rutter.
A magnificent tribute to one of the world’s most panoramic cities from the masters of Venetian Renaissance – Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, respectively, father and son. This collection includes brass fanfares and choral music, resplendently sung and played.
Tippett never hesitated to go his own way. He was expelled from grammar school for attempting to convert his friends to atheism, espoused Trotskyism and, in 1943, was jailed for three months as a conscientious objector. Tippett’s time would come, by the 1960s and 70s, thanks to younger interpreters such as Colin Davis who were unfazed […]
The potential of music as a means of adding dignity and grandeur to state occasions has surely been lost on a few rulers in history. Portraits of antique kings and queens are more often admired (or the reverse) for their artistic qualities, as opposed to the enhancement in the status of their subjects they were […]
Jean-Baptiste Duval of the Venetian Republic’s French Embassy records that on Christmas Eve 1607, Midnight Mass in St. Mark’s was celebrated by the light of more than one thousand candles, sixty huge torches and silver lamps. He counted no less than eight ‘choirs’ of voices and instruments sounding back and forth across the gilded vaults […]
This is a gem of an album, containing not only some glorious and seldom heard pieces but is also the only available recorded version of ‘Soberana Maria’ (anon.). ‘A piece of heart-breaking beauty, sung exquisitely a capella’ wrote a reviewer on Amazon.com of this admirable album made in 1968 – one of Roger Norrington’s earliest recordings. […]
More than 250 years of music celebrating the reign of the great British monarchs CD 1 – HANDEL: Coronation Anthems Handel’s four uplifting Coronation Anthems, including the epic Zadok the Priest with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and his beautiful Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, with its celestial invocation for trumpet and counter-tenor, ‘Eternal […]
