 |
||
Latest newsThe King's Singers review in The Observer
On Saturday 7 August The King's Singers performed in the Three Choirs Festival at Tewkesbury Abbey to a sold out audience. Below is a review by Fiona Maddocks from The Observer. The Three Choirs festival, centred in more.. Pachelbel Vespers on The Early Music Show more..
Don't miss Eric Whitacre at London's Union Chapel 2 August more..
Music Productions places music content for synchronisation and licensing in: •
Film Tel: +44 (0) 1753 646100
|
Latest News
18 / 06 / 2010 - Whitacre's 'Paradise Lost' receives rave review from The New York TimesA Juggernaut Rolls Into Carnegie, Chorus in Tow By STEVE SMITH You felt a buzz of electric anticipation in the air at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night long before a single note had sounded. The event at hand was mounted by Distinguished Concerts International New York, a producing organization that regularly presents choral extravaganzas with participants from around the world. Thunderous applause and illicit camera flashes greeted a 425-member choir as it efficiently crowded onto the stage. The singers, who ranged in age from 14 to 73, had come from throughout the United States, Canada and Ireland to perform with Eric Whitacre, a handsome, charismatic 40-year-old composer whose profile among choral enthusiasts amounts to a rock star’s adulation. Bounding to the podium with a pumped fist, Mr. Whitacre took the frenzy in stride. “Tonight you’re all coming home with me,” he announced brightly to the audience. An isolated shriek rang out. “Thanks, Mom,” he responded. To call Mr. Whitacre a phenomenon is to sell his rapid ascent short. Having pursued a high school passion for classical choral music through training at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the Juilliard School, he developed a style based on clear melodies, thrilling harmonies, evocative effects and sensitive text handling. His self-published scores sell in the hundreds of thousands; discs of his music on the Hyperion and Naxos labels are also best sellers. In May he signed an exclusive contract — a relative rarity for a composer — with the Decca label. Knowing all of this, you could still question what he presented here. Instead of his choral compositions, Mr. Whitacre conducted a condensed concert version of “Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings,” a musical-theater piece he created with David Noroña, a lyricist and director, and Edward Esch, a poet. Inspired by Japanese manga and anime, the work details struggles among a band of young angels deprived of their wings and abandoned by their parents during a war. Logos, eldest of the company and a well-meaning but overzealous guardian, is confronted by Exstasis, his secret lover, whose visions have revealed where the angels’ wings are hidden. Leading a band of rebels whose feisty interplay had a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” chemistry, Exstasis delivers transcendence at a terrible personal cost. To accompany his melodramatic apocalypse fantasy, Mr. Whitacre concocted an eclectic mix of whooshing synthesizers and thumping techno beats, accented by two taiko drummers and rich, melancholy contributions from a splendid cellist, Fang Fang Xu. A cast of bright theatrical singers played their roles winningly; Hila Plitmann, a crystalline-voiced soprano and Mr. Whitacre’s wife, stood out as Exstasis. The solos and ensembles they sang suggested the work of a younger, hipper Andrew Lloyd Webber, with fleeting hints of Bernstein and Sondheim. Efficiently boiled down through narratives read by Mr. Noroña, the show was worth hearing. As a vehicle for a titanic choir, however, it fell short; choral passages, though predictably ravishing, made up only a tiny fraction of an agreeably bombastic affair. Opportunity lost, perhaps; still, no one in the frenetic audience complained. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/arts/music/17eric.html
|
Copyright © 2010 Music Productions LtdttttCompany Number: 6221996ttttRegistered in Great Britain |