BBC Singers – Carols Revisited – Christmas with the BBC Singers (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 23:51 minutes | 247 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
In 2024 the BBC Singers celebrate its centenary year, and since its founding almost 100 years ago, the choir has held a unique place at the heart of the UK’s choral scene through continued collaborations across the years with many of the world’s leading composers, conductors and soloists.
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BBC Singers, Hallé Choirs, BBC Philharmonic, Ben Gernon, Vimbayi Kaziboni – Emily Howard: The Anvil (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:52 minutes | 594 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Delphian Records
The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed.
To a solo soprano who narrates and remembers and a baritone who seems caught in the action, the work adds the immense forces of four choirs – each given music tailored to its particular capabilities, from professional to amateur – and the BBC Philharmonic to ask: what future was being forged in the tragic events that took place that day?
A second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, Elliptics, is quieter, more elegiac: a meditation on love and death, and on what we hope will survive.
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BBC Singers & Martyn Brabbins – John Pickard: Mass in Troubled Times (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:12 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Previous BIS releases of works by John Pickard have mainly featured instrumental compositions. This recording presents another facet of the British composer’s work, with compositions for choir under the expert direction of Martyn Brabbins as well as two instrumental pieces. The five short Latin motets as well as Ozymandias, Pickard’s opus 1, can be described as ‘occasional pieces’ composed during the composer’s student years or for the choir he conducts at the University of Bristol. They display solid tonal grounding and mainly homophonic writing and provide a stepping-stone to some of the more dissonant style found in the latter works. Written for the BBC Singers, whose reputation is well established, the Mass in Troubled Times is an ambitious work bearing witness to a context of global uncertainty. The Mass is a collaboration with the writer Gavin D’Costa, who conceived a complex text based on multiple sources in five languages, combining Western and Middle Eastern religious texts with poetry evoking the plight of refugees. Orion for trumpet and organ, which is partly programmatic, evoking the most splendid constellation and allowing trumpeter Chloë Abbott to shine, and Tesserae for solo organ, with its dazzling virtuosity, played here by the work’s first performer, David Goode, complete this disc.
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BBC Symphony Orchestra, John Andrews, BBC Singers – Smyth: Der Wald (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:06:21 minutes | 2,13 GB | Genre: Classical, Opera
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Resonus Classics
For over 100 years the only opera by a woman to have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Der Wald
is a taut, brooding drama where the simplicity of village life comes under threat from the uncontrollable desires unleashed by the darkness of the forest.Richly orchestrated, harmonically daring, and demanding a huge expressive range from the cast, the narrative drives relentlessly forward from wedding to tragedy in a single act, observed pitilessly by the eternal spirits of the forest.John Andrews conducts the BBC Singers, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and an international cast in the first ever recording of this work, using Smyth’s English version of the libretto.
BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers, Jiří Bělohlávek – Smetana: The Bartered Bride (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 02:16:16 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | ©
A classic! And yet Smetana was thoroughly irritated by the torrents of praise lavished, in the last years of his life, on this Bartered Bride which had been categorically rejected at its premiere (1866) by a Czech public waiting to hear the genuine national opera. Four versions of the work later, and after many critical complaints (sometimes it was found too long, sometimes too short), it was realised that the composer had given birth to a genre built to last. For nearly 150 years now, The Bartered Bride has triumphed in opera houses all over the world; and in the present recording it is in the hands of a true team of experts.
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BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers, John Adams – John Adams: Doctor Atomic (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 02:37:11 minutes | 1,52 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Nonesuch
His most visionary and ambitious stage work to date … Adams’s conducting, second to none in his own music, had tremendous conviction and unique authority, with every facet of the score’s terrible beauty laid bare … thrilling playing and choral singing … Gerald Finley conveyed Oppenheimer’s moral agony with singing of great refinement and subtlety.’ — Guardian
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