New York Polyphony are a quartet of singers; Geoffrey Williams – counter-tenor, Steven Caldicott Wilson and Andrew Fuchs – tenors and Craig Phillips – bass. On Sky of My Heart they mostly sing unaccompanied but are joined by the LeStrange Viols (Loren Ludwig and John Mark Rozendaal – treble viol, Kivie Cahn-Lipman – tenor viol, Zoe Weiss and Douglas Kelley – bass viol).
The album is a mix of Renaissance and contemporary pieces; most of the latter composed for NYP. They are very good singers with terrific control and a very clean largely vibrato free sound that works well for most of the music on the disk. Some of the material is religious; William Byrd’s setting of Ecce quam bonum, Becky McGlade’s setting of Prudentius’ Of the Father’s Love Begotten and Ivan Moody’s settings of three excerpts from the Song of Songs. All of these are unaccompanied in a churchy sort of style. Continue reading
Rooms of Elsinore is a new CD of music related to 
Once in a while one comes across a really impressive new opera and I would put The Lord of Cries; music by John Corigliano, text by Mark Adamo, into that category. It’s an example of how opera is good at telling “big stories”. In this case the base material is Euripides’ Bacchae but Adamo has relocated it to 19th century London and very cleverly layered onto it the core elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to create a multi-layered and subtle psychological thriller.
Sounds and Sweet Airs: A Shakespeare Songbook is a long and unusual CD by Carolyn Sampson, Roderick Williams and Joseph Middleton. The songs set texts (mostly) by Shakespeare but some of it is translated into German or French and in the case of Hannah Kendall’s Rosalind it’s fragments stitched together. Some of the material will be familiar to amateurs of art song but less than one might expect. There’s no Finzi or Quilter!
operaramblings 