Carolyn Sampson Wadsworth

This BBC Proms concert, titled A Handel Celebration, commemorates the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death and the 30th anniversary of the founding of The Sixteen, which got its name from the fact that the original chorus had 16 members. The forces used here are a bit larger than those Harry Christophers usually employs. The mixed-voice chorus numbers 30, and the orchestra is listed at 42 members, although it does not appear that they are all onstage at the same time.

Poulenc's Stabat Mater, which the composer described as, "a requiem without despair," was written in 1950 following the death of Christian Berard, a leading figure of 1940s Paris who designed the sets for Cocteau's films and plays. This masterly work, dedicated to the Virgin of Rocamadour, gives pride of place to the chorus and clearly shows its line of descent from the French motets of the age of Louis XIV. It is paired with the Sept Repons de Tenebres, Poulenc's last choral work. Although sacred in nature, it was written for a non-religious celebration, the opening of New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. This recording's superb cast features soprano Carolyn Sampson and the Estonian Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra led by Daniel Reuss.

What can anyone add to the praise that has deservedly been heaped on Robert King and the King's Consort's 11 discs of the complete sacred music of Vivaldi? Can one add that every single performance is first class – wonderfully musical, deeply dedicated, and profoundly spiritual? Can one add that every single performer is first class – absolutely in-tune, entirely in-sync, and totally committed? Can one add that every single recording is first class – amazingly clean, astoundingly clear, and astonishingly warm? One can because it's all true and it's all been said before by critics and listeners across the globe.

As the mysterious opening bars of the Kyrie gradually emerge into the light, we know that this recording of Mozart’s glorious Great Mass in C minor is a special one: the tempi perfect, the unfolding drama of the choral writing so carefully judged, and, above it all, the crystalline beauty of soloist Carolyn Sampson’s soprano, floating like a ministering angel. Masaaki Suzuki’s meticulous attention to detail, so rewarding in his remarkable Bach recordings, shines throughout this disc, the playing alert, the choir responsive, the soloists thrilling. And there is the bonus of an exhilarating Exsultate, Jubilate with Sampson on top form.

Hyperion’s Record of the Month sees the long overdue return to the studio of The King’s Consort, under the baton of the group’s newly appointed Artistic Director Matthew Halls. Here the ensemble presents the premiere recording of Handel’s Parnasso in Festa: a unique example in Handel’s enormous creative career of a fully-fledged celebratory serenata (or Festa teatrale). This form was rare in England but had developed in parallel with opera in Italy, where it was popular for commemorating special occasions of international significance. Parnasso in Festa was written for Princess Anne’s marriage to Prince William of Orange.

For its final concert of the 2021–22 season and Osmo Vänskä’s last as artistic director, the Minnesota Orchestra chose to present Mahler’s mammoth Eighth Symphony, which calls for one of the largest complement of performers in the history of music, a symbol of the communitarian spirit of collective cultural, social and religious-philosophical endeavour in what has been referred to as a ‘Mass for the Masses’. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, unlike his others, reveals no contrary despairing voice.

Riccardo Chailly - Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus in Bach's city of Leipzig - conducts the city's famous Gewandhausorchester in the glorious Christmas Oratorio. An outstanding vocal cast includes Martin Lattke as the evangelist, acclaimed English soprano Carolyn Sampson and the voices of the Dresdner Kammerchor. The six parts which make up the Christmas Oratorio tell the biblical story from Christ's birth to the adoration of the shepherds and the Magi, and the flight in to Egypt to escape Herod's slaughter of the infants. Having first conducted the Gewandhausorchester in 1986, Riccardo Chailly's association with Leipzig is now only one year less than Bach's.

Recorded in association with a live performance from Birmingham's Symphony Hall last year, this account of Stanford's Requiem rescues a magnificent work from wholly unjustified neglect. The performance of Charles Villiers Stanford's forgotten late-Victorian masterpiece, marking 125 years since the premiere of the Requiem at the Birmingham Triennial Festival, featured a number of international soloists alongside Brabbins including Carolyn Sampson and Marta Fontanal-Simmons (both Birmingham alumni), with James Way and Ross Ramgobin.

Here is a splendid revival by Paul McCreesh and an excellent cast, as seen at the Barbican in 2003, of one of Gluck’s lesser-known dramatic works. Where the composer’s previous ‘reform’ operas, Orfeo and Alceste, had been dramas of life and death, Paride ed Elena deals with a gallant subject: Paris’s wooing of Helen, here betrothed rather than married to Menelaus. Cupid pulls the strings, while Athene appears as a malign dea ex machina to utter warnings of future carnage – which the lovers blithely disregard. McCreesh and his superb orchestra relish Gluck’s portrayal of contrasting worlds and generate plenty of tension when the emotional temperature finally begins to rise.Though Paride ed Elena is even more static than Alceste, variety comes from Gluck’s portrayal of the two contrasting national characters, Sparta and Troy.

Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan made their first recording of the St Matthew Passion in March 1999. Twenty years later, in April 2019, it was time once again, as the singers and players gathered in the Concert Hall of the Saitama Arts Theater in Japan. ‘A profound joy’ is how Masaaki Suzuki describes his emotion at the opportunity to record Bach’s great fresco of Christ’s Passion for a second time. And this time, he and his ensemble have brought with them into the concert hall a profound and collective familiarity with Bach’s choral music, after having recorded more or less all of it in the meantime, including the complete sacred cantatas.