RIAS Kammerchor reviews

Rolando Villazón, Joyce DiDonato, Marina Rebeka, Regula Mühlemann, Tara Erraught, Adam Plachetka; RIAS Kammerchor; Chamber Orchestra of Europe/Yannick Nézet-Séguin (DG)

Britten: Hymn to St Cecilia; Choral Dances from Gloriana; A Hymn to the Virgin; Five Flower Songs; A.M.D.G.

RIAS Kammerchor/Justin Doyle (Harmonia Mundi)

Haydn: Missa Cellensis

RIAS Kammerchor; Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/Justin Doyle, et al (Harmonia Mundi)

A dazzling presentation of Haydn’s hidden gem

'Justin Doyle with his team of talented soloists do this work proud'

René Jacobs gives a 'bold, innovative and passionate' interpretation of Mozart's Requiem

Bold, innovative and passionate, René Jacobs’s new reading of Mozart’s Requiem towers above the crowd. Pierre-Henri Dutron’s new completion of this famously unfinished score illuminates how Mozart was re-forging his musical language in the year he died to make it tauter and deeper, yet more transparent. So forceful are Mozart’s ideas that they regenerate themselves even in the completion by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, which Dutron adapts to realise more fully Mozart’s new procedures.

Mozart: Die Zauberflote

Anyone tempted to programme the remote-control to skip over the dialogue in this Zauberflöte will rue the day. For this is a total experience, perfectly tailored for private listening. René Jacobs thinks of it as a Hörspiel: it’s a play to be heard – and I don’t know a recorded Zauberflöte more thrillingly alive with fantasy, profoundly musical imagination, real magic, and real fun too.