Category: Singers
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Patrick Hawes: Revelation, Beatitudes and Quantia Qualia
This is a tranquil and calming album, despite the title (Revelations featuring blood, mountains of fire, bottomless pits and destruction). It’s a weighty topic delivered with a light touch; the nine pieces that make up the album are inspired by the Book of Revelation and its imagery. A second work, Beatitudes, is a collection setting…
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Hibla Gerzmava: Opera Jazz Blues
This CD is a programme of work it probably never crossed your mind you’d need: soprano Gerzmava sings classical, jazz and blues. This doesn’t mean she stops being a soprano and sings jazz in husky tones, it means you get jazz/blues (and classical) piano accompanying what is mostly operatic singing. Track one is a delicate…
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Raphael Doyle: Closer
Most albums get compared with other albums or bands; this one is a book, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. That’s the story of his life in Auschwitz and its first chapter describes how his (and by extension) the reader’s humanity can be completely taken away if someone’s a big enough bastard. It’s…
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Oskar’s Drum: A Cathedral Of Hands
Another CD that’s hard to review; on one hand, it’s excellent, on the other it’s hard to know why we should tell anyone to buy it. Is consistently interesting a good enough reason? Oskar’s Drum is Patrik Fitzgerald and Yves Altana. Older readers may have come across Fitzgerald’s work, as he claims to be an…
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Regina Spektor: Remember Us To Life
It’s hard to know what to say about this. Spektor writes piano-led good songs that tread a line between the arty and the pop, never too whacky not to be enjoyable but never quite pure pop, neither Laurie Anderson nor Adele. She’s a solid performer and sounds like no-one else; the only question is whether…
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Aylish Kerrigan, Dearbhla Collins: I Am Wind on Sea
This is a selection contemporary vocal music from Ireland, six composers’ work presented by mezzo-soprano Aylish Kerrigan and pianist Dearbhla Collins. By contemporary we mean the last century or so and by Irish we don’t mean songs about whisky in jars: while some parts of this CD are charming, others are more challenging. The opening…
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Randall Thompson: Requiem
We should have played this sooner: it’s superb and would be a great recording for early Christmas morning (or late Christmas Eve). The sleeve notes say that more than 30 years after Thompson’s death, several of his choral works are performed “with regularity”, and Alleluia (1941) at one point had more copies in print than…
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Donizetti and Mayr: Messa Di Gloria and Credo In D Major
Again, not really Christmas music but at least it’s church music, and the polar opposite of the comforting open-fire-and-logs baroque we recently reviewed: this is the music from a Dan Brown film where a full choir sings in St Peter’s as Tom Hanks fights to keep evil at bay. According to the sleeve notes, Donizetti’s…
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James Whitbourn: Carolae Music for Christmas
Another Christmas album but like the Septura one last week, mostly not specifically for Christmas. It’s a choral album but Whitbourn is adept at taking magnificent music and making it listener-friendly; this could be music from 500 years ago, contemplating the Christian message and enormity of eternity but in Whitbourn’s hands it’s palatable for modern…
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Michael Bublé: Nobody But Me
Nobody But Me It’s Christmas! It must be time for the Bublé to release an album. Thankfully it’s not a re-release of Christmas, though having released it as a normal CD, then deluxe, super deluxe, super deluxe with bells, super super deluxe with whistles and tassels and super dooper deluxe best-ever honest (remastered) with free…
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