Reviews

This is the fourth time Sansara have performed for Stockbridge Music. The choir has grown fast in stature here and abroad, and it’s difficult to avoid endless superlatives about their singing. Here are three prestigious plaudits: the composer Sir James McMillan ‘truly special, a brilliant new choir’; the Observer ‘perfect intonation, clean pure sound, choral…

They have thrilled us before in the ideal acoustic of Stockbridge Town Hall. Remarkably, three years on, the make-up of this superbly gifted youthful group has seen only one change, the viola player. Remarkable, because by now such very young players might have disbanded their group to forge individual careers. They have to an extent. One of them is…

  By James Montgomery Had Jean Mouton been in St Peter’s Church Stockbridge for this additional Stockbridge Music concert (he was born around 1459 and lived for at least sixty years) a warm glow would have infused his spirit. Quite simply, Sansara’s performance of his Nesciens mater, one of the evening’s items, was divine. This choir,…

By James Montgomery Does Professor Norris ever sleep? He must be the most energetic and prodigious musician alive today. You name it, he’s done it, does it, plays it, and will tell you anything about it. A walking, talking, broadcasting, teaching, instrument-playing encyclopaedia of music. A flag bearer too for a 19th century musician who…

By James Montgomery Thomas Weelkes was described by the authorities at Chichester Cathedral as a ‘comon drunckard, notorious swearer and blasphemer’ and sacked in about 1615 for being inebriated while playing the organ, but not before he’d written ground-breaking music – forty anthems, at least ten church services and yes, a hundred or so madrigals, sad…

  By James Montgomery With attack, that’s how these young players began their performance. This was the spirited first of four movements of Haydn’s String Quartet Opus 76, written in his twilight years at the same time he was working on The Creation. In this quartet’s Adagio, Haydn used the similar complex, adventurous and inventive harmonic…

By James Montgomery What other instrument played these days possesses more than four thousand years of beguiling musical pedigree? I suspect hardly any. The ancient Egyptians would have marvelled at how their single stringed legacy would become multi-stringed and enable a vast variety of key changes and sonority. To show us how, Francs Kelly with…

By Guy Boney Etruscans, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, angels(of course) and a full house at Stockbridge Music’s concert in the Town Hall last saturday( 17th October 2015) have all thrilled over nearly three milenia to the ethereal sound of harp music.  Rulers from Agamemnon to Edward VII have joined their company. Sarah Deere-Jonesis is as accomplished…

James Montgomery writes: The Brook Street Band are four consummate instrumentalists who played sonatas written purely by baroque composers who lived between 1653 and 1764.  They performed as one, delighting in the thematic detail, the swapping of musical phrases, the suspensions before the resolutions, made so much more intense by the use of original baroque…

James Montgomery writes: With surround sound – that’s how Sansara greeted the audience in St Peter’s Church for the second concert of this year’s Stockbridge Music series.  The twenty one young singers split into smaller choirs along both side aisles to perform the complex motet Nasciens Mater by the French composer Jean Mouton (1459-1522).  A divine sound…