Patrick James

This 2014 Hyperion collection of 22 hymns sung by the Choir of Westminster Abbey is a straightforward presentation of familiar versions for choir and organ. For the most part, the arrangements are conventional four-part settings, with occasional interpolations of seldom-heard harmonizations and descants, and the performances by the men and boys are appropriately reverent and joyous. The majority of selections are hymns of praise, including Praise, my soul, the king of heaven; Thine be the glory; and Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, though Drop, drop slow tears; I bind unto myself today; and Let all mortal flesh keep silence bring a more somber and penitential mood to the program. The recordings were made in late 2012 and early 2013 in Westminster Abbey, so the sound of the album is typically resonant and spacious, and the choir has a well-blended tone, though the trade-off for the glorious acoustics is a loss of clarity in some of the words.

Immortal Memory is a collaboration between vocalist Lisa Gerrard and Irish composer Patrick Cassidy. Billed as a cycle of life and death and rebirth, Immortal Memory is better described as an orphaned film score. Cassidy's warm arrangements allow the former Dead Can Dance singer to step out of the dark medieval world that she's called home for nearly 20 years – though there is much of that world within these castle walls – and focus on the simplicity of love, faith, and loss with a grace that's bereft of the icy perfection of her previous work. Gerrard, whose voice has aged like the finest oak, displays an almost supernatural mastery of the material. Her effortless contralto wraps itself around the ten Gaelic, Latin, and Aramaic spirituals like an evening prayer, making each stunning entrance the equivalent of audio comfort food.

The flute playing of Patrick Gallois epitomizes several of the prime virtues of the French flute tradition; fine-spun liquidity of tone, delectable phrasing and exemplary breath control, and, when required, the ability to project and capture the attention of the listener, even across full blown orchestral tuttis. But these qualities aside, Gallois is an artist of evident distinction and innate musicality, and I have no hesitation in commending this new recording of works by Rodrigo and Khachaturian to any collector, who, like myself, may have only a limited appetite for the flute!

This album, the first in a series devoted to the 41 symphonies of Michael Haydn, leads off with perhaps the most historically famous one of all: the Sinfonia in G major, Perger 16, is none other than the missing Symphony No. 37 of Mozart, which was not removed from the Mozart canon until 1907. The reason for the error was that a copy of the work exists in Mozart's handwriting; he wrote a slow introduction to the first movement (not performed here), and apparently copied out the piece in preparation. It remains difficult to believe that listeners' suspicions weren't raised before that; the work's simple, squarish movements resemble those of the symphonies Mozart wrote in his mid-teens.

This is part of a series of releases on the Naxos label devoted to the 40 symphonies of Michael Haydn, younger brother of Franz Joseph. These have been commercially successful, and it's easy to see why: there's music of unsuspected high quality here, and you can see why the younger Haydn's work was taken for Mozart's in several cases for decades, and why Mozart, who was spare in his praise of other composers, bestowed it upon this one. All four of these symphonies are in the three-movement form that Mozart had mostly left behind by the late 1770s and 1780s (when the Haydn works were composed), but the individual movements are quite confidently handled, with the elegant but harmonically wide-ranging slow movements perhaps the best of the lot.