Stephen Layton

The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Stephen Layton – Duruflé: Requiem; Poulenc: Lenten Motets (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:02 minutes | 923 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records

One of the twentieth century’s best-loved choral works, Duruflé’s Requiem—a magical synthesis of the old (plainsong) and the new (a harmonic language appropriate to its time and place)—continues to cast its potent spell over performers and listeners alike. This new recording from Stephen Layton and his Trinity forces fully deserves to be regarded as ‘definitive’.

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The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Stephen Layton – Briggs: Hail, gladdening Light & Other Works (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:01:53 minutes | 2,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion

In their recording of choral works by organist and composer David Briggs (*1962), Stephen Layton and the choir of Trinity College Cambridge revel in the splendor of the Saint-Eustache church in Paris. Almost apocalyptic masses of sound envelop the Gothic vaults when the full power of the first-class Trinity Choir and the mighty van den Heuvel organ from 1989 is unleashed.

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The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Stephen Layton – Ešenvalds: Northern Lights, Stars & Other Choral Works (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:46 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion

The intensely practical choral music of the young Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds is steadily gaining appreciation across the world. The works on this new album owe their genesis to commissions from the United States, England and northern Europe and encompass ethereal expressions of uniquely arctic phenomena (listen for wine glasses turned—and tuned—to wondrously simple but devastating effect within the choral texture), American ballads and several works in the ‘Anglican tradition’, the fruits of the composer’s recent residency at Trinity College Cambridge. Trinity College Choir Cambridge here returns the compliment, as it were, with superlative performances of these varied and engaging works, all recorded under the watchful eye of the composer and conductor Stephen Layton.

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The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge & Stephen Layton – Anthems, Vol. 1 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:48 minutes | 1,34 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records

Exciting accounts of eight anthems spanning nearly two hundred years, with a welcome emphasis firmly on recent works.

Edward Elgar was a great admirer of Samuel Sebastian Wesley, and late in his life, in May 1923, he made an orchestration of the organ part of Wesley’s anthem Let us lift up our heart, the first performance of which was given at the Worcester Three Choirs Festival in September that year. Unfortunately, the manuscript is now lost. Though not readily associated with Anglican church music (despite being fully aware of its repertoire), Elgar composed two major extended anthems. The first—Great is the Lord, Op 67, a substantial multi-sectional work, begun in 1910—is a setting of Psalm 48 and was eventually used to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Royal Society in 1912. It was first sung in Westminster Abbey on 16 July of that year under the baton of the Abbey’s director of music Sir Frederick Bridge. In the ebullient outer sections in D major, it is possible to hear echoes of the finale of Elgar’s violin concerto (‘is mount Zion, on the sides of the north’) as a counterpoint to the main theme, while the contrasting inner sections seem to draw more extensively on the style of thematic material first heard in The Apostles and The Kingdom, in particular the episode for baritone solo (‘We have thought on thy loving-kindness’).

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The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge & Stephen Layton- Ivo Antognini: Come to Me in the Silence of the Night – Choral Works (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:54 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records

Come to me (2019) was written for The Aeolians of Oakwood University, Alabama, conducted by Jason Max Ferdinand. The text is by one of the composer’s favourite poets, Christina Rossetti. Originally entitled Echo, this poignant poem concerns a person who has lost their beloved long ago and only through dreams is able to have an echo of what once was but never will be again. In his setting, the composer seeks to empathize with and to describe the feelings of the grieving protagonist.

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