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![Album cover for 'Ever Changing Skies: Choral Works' featuring a colorful painted sky with clouds and text naming Harry Bradford, Kirsty O'Neill, Danny O'Neill, and choir Recordare.]()
Ever Changing Skies£12.99
Album of the Month
Recent Highlights
In this debut recording of songs, arias and duets from tenor David Webb, composer Arthur Sullivan emerges as both a figure of Savoy theatre polish, and as a composer of clarity and restraint. Drawing on years of experience with this repertoire, the artists bring an ease that feels instinctive and assured. With the Academy of Ancient Music, this is the first recording of Gilbert and Sullivan on period instruments, offering a sound closer to that heard in Victorian drawing rooms, concert halls and band stands than the modern pit. Textures open out, the words (including texts from William S Gilbert) carry with directness, and Sullivan’s craft is newly apparent across three decades of his career.
David Maw’s writing for organ displays a remarkably innovative sense of colour and texture, combined with a rigorous compositional discipline, making it some of the most significant – and challenging – in the modern British repertoire for the instrument. In his latest disc for Resonus Classics, Stephen Farr explores its full range in three major works and two shorter pieces, most of which are receiving their premiere recordings. The organ of Norwich Cathedral – recorded here for the first time since a major restoration and rebuild by Harrison & Harrison – is the ideal vehicle for these virtuosic works, which explore its impressive resources to the fullest extent.
Barbara, born Monique Serf in Paris in 1930, was one of twentieth century France’s most renowned singer- songwriters. Her most celebrated song, L’Aigle Noir, sold more than a million copies on the day of its release. Yet, despite huge fame during her lifetime, she is little known outside of her home country. This album, with new English versions of her songs by Jessica Walker, has been created to bring the potency of her words and music to an English- speaking audience for the first time. The songs, grappling with dark and complex events from Barbara’s life, are an unclassifiable mix of cabaret and art song, here, lovingly brought to life by a superb lineup of musicians - vocalist and translator Jessica Walker is joined by pianist and arranger Joseph Atkins and the Solem Quartet.