Vocal & Choral
CD and Other Review

Review: Roma æterna

At first glance, you may wonder whether we need yet another disc of some of the Counter-Reformation’s greatest hits. Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, Tu Es Petrus and Sicut Cervus as well as Victoria’s Missa O Quam Gloriosum have been recorded countless times and surely there are many interesting and lesser-known pieces to explore? After all, Palestrina did write at least 104 masses and how many of those do we get to hear? These are quite legitimate questions, but New York Polyphony makes a plausible case for saying there’s always room for one more account of core repertory. The group’s main point of difference from previous recordings is that they perform the music one voice to a part and at a pitch to accommodate their four male voices (countertenor, tenor, baritone and bass). The fine quartet of main singers (Geoffrey Williams, Steven Caldicott Wilson, Christopher Dylan Herbert and Craig Phillips) are joined by countertenor Tim Keeler; tenor Andrew Fuchs and bass-baritone Jonathan Woody for the Palestrina mass and motet, and for some chant propers for Easter that are interwoven with the mass. Singing the Missa Papae Marcelli a fourth below its regular pitch creates quite a different sound world, particularly requiring…

October 13, 2016
Vocal & Choral
CD and Other Review

Review: Decades: A Century of Song Volume 1 (1810-1820)

The big hitters of 19th-century song are well known, but how did they earn their reputations, who were their respected contemporaries, and how did the art form progress over time? It’s always been easy for a competent, or even an inspired composer, to get buried by the sheer overwhelming enthusiasm for a Beethoven or a Brahms, so a chance to examine the development of song from 1810 to 1910, decade by decade, might be expected to throw up a few surprises. And so it proves in the first of an excellently curated series from accompanist Malcolm Martineau and a stellar quintet of leading singers. Taking Schubert’s miracle years – 1815 and 1816 – as its starting point, Martineau chooses 16 of his finest as a peg on which to hang a thoroughgoing and eclectic selection of the greatest Lieder and song that were around at the time. Ranging across Europe, we visit Spain, Italy, Czechoslovakia, German  and France in a song lover’s magical mystery tour. The under-recorded Canadian tenor Michael Schade gets the lion’s share of the disc and the majority of the Schubert. Like Peter Schreier, to whom he bears a striking vocal resemblance, he’s a dab hand with…

September 30, 2016