Daniel Green

Sounding as glorious as ever under Director of Music Daniel Hyde, the Choir of King’s College celebrates Easter with a wide-ranging and beautifully assembled program recorded in King’s College Chapel. Starting with an anthem by the late English composer, conductor, and musician George Malcolm, complete with an attention-grabbing introductory fanfare by Matthew Martin (Director of College Music at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge), the musical journey runs from William Byrd to Maurice Duruflé with some well-known hymns along the way. There are numerous highlights: the high drama of Rossini’s “O salutaris Hostia,” Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s very Victorian “Wash Me Throughly,” Antonio Lotti’s resonant “Crucifixus à 6,” and the gentle poise of John Ireland’s “Greater Love Hath No Man.”

This is not a film score album. Not even an album with cover versions. Not at all. On the contrary, it is a journey, a sort of free and rigorous wandering in a world which is both alien and familiar to us. So, could it be Cinema? Yes, no doubt about it… But Cinema which has been remembered, revisited, rephrased.

Conductor Daniel Reuss' splendid new recording of Handel's Solomon expands the extraordinarily broad range of music, including works by Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, Elgar, Ligeti, Stefan Wolpe, and the Bang on a Can composers, in which he has shown his mastery. His 2006 recording of Martin's Le vin herbé was one of the highlights of the year. Handel scored the oratorio for unusually large choral and orchestral forces, and the sound of this performance, with the RIAS-Kammerchor and Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, is warmly humanistic, beautifully paced, and tonally sumptuous, and is sung and played with stylistic assurance and lively dramatic passion.