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Candida Thompson’s performance of Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel with understated beauty, immaculate phrasing and restrained emotion, steals the show.

From the oppressed Catholic minority of 16th-century England to contemporary settings, The Gesualdo Six bring their Wishing Tree programme to Auckland. 

A timely performance of Faure's Requiem in Singapore, coinciding with the funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth II.

The Tallis Scholars return, better than ever, in this full-length streaming concert.

The Bergen Phil and the Edvard Grieg Choir trace music from Elizabethan themes to 20th century works on them, culminating in Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.

The Sixteen enchant the audience in Sydney with an intelligently-created programme of British composers.

A gorgeous evening of supremely confident, and well-executed, Elizabethan choral music from exciting Belgian choir Vox Luminis.

A magical, brilliantly conceived programme of Byrd, Tallis and Arvo Pärt

Andrew Carwood and The Cardinall's Musick bring passion, vitality and grit to Tallis, and première a striking new piece by Cheryl Frances-Hoad in performances of the highest standard.

Ruth Mackenzie, Holland Festival’s vivacious and invigorating new director, closed her first edition with a twelve hour Prom, reinventing it as a mini-festival at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.

The choir tackle an ambitious, if overly long programme of Advent-themed works with mixed results.

Janine Jansen's International Chamber Music Festival offered a special treat this year: scratchcard concert, where a scratchcard determined which concerts one got to see.

New York Polyphony brought Dallas residents a refreshing interlude to the post-Thanksgiving consumerist madness, with a recital of Christmas music old and new.

Part of the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center, The Tallis Scholars gave a selection of music that ranged from John Taverner to Nico Muhly.

The Tallis Scholars have been one of the foremost Renaissance vocal ensemble since their inception forty years ago. This was the ensemble’s first visit to New Zealand (organised by Chamber Music New Zealand in partnership with the New Zealand Choral Federation and Dean Endowment Trust) and the performance quality made it worth every minute of the forty year wait.

The British vocal ensemble Stile Antico made an appearance in Cleveland on Friday evening, 11 October, at the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist, as part of their current American tour to perform a brilliant live rendition of their most recent album The Phoenix Rising.

On the night of 29 December, 1940, after a brief respite over Christmas, German bombers roared back over Britain. They dropped numerous incendiary bombs on the City of London, causing massive destruction, loss of life, and uncontrollable fires that raged for days. Miraculously, St Paul’s Cathedral survived the onslaught intact, even as much of the surrounding neighbourhood was reduced to rubble.

Singing polyphonic music requires a specific sound. To be truly effective there must be a beautifully rounded and well blended choral sound, but at the same time the individual lines must be clearly decipherable within the overall texture. This is a balance that The Tallis Scholars seem to find effortless.

Some of England’s greatest choral music dates from the period of political and religious upheaval during the late 15th to early 17th centuries, when composers were having to adapt to new monarchs and changes to the church service almost as frequently as they would have changed their shirts.

Choral concerts often have programmes that read like compilation CDs. I don’t mean this negatively: there are countless reasons why a greater number of contrasting pieces is required – timbral, textual, temporal, contextual, historical, and so on.

The Brandenburg Choral Festival is an enormous endeavour, with hundreds of concerts all over London, featuring all kinds of choral music and a diverse range of performers. Tonight we were in the beautiful church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the heart of the festival, for a late-night concert of stunning Tallis, Byrd and Allegri by candlelight.

The programme for this concert – entitled “The Day of Thy Power” – comprised Robert Fayrfax’s Missa Tecum principium, and Tallis’ Lamentations I and II. In both Fayrfax’s and Tallis’ time, there was great political, social and religious unrest and change; the arrival of the Tudors and the actions of each successive heir to the throne brought tumult to England and beyond.

The Sixteen’s three appearances in the line-up for this year’s Spitalfields Music Festival showcase the breadth of their repertoire. On June 15 and 16, they will premiere Alan Roth’s new musical setting of Beckett monologues, Old Earth. First, on June 9, was something altogether more familiar.

In my notes for this evening’s concert by Renaissance, a chamber choir founded by the young singer, conductor and composer Ben Rowarth, one word kept recurring – “thoughtful”. This was a programme that had been carefully put together, and which was performed without any unnecessary flashiness or attempts to impress.

I wasn’t sure, at first, how it would feel to listen to sacred Renaissance works in St. David’s Hall, a modern, secular concert hall. I wasn’t convinced that the beauty of these pieces and the compositional effects, so suited to the vaulted lofts of a cathedral, would carry over when so far removed from their original context.

A celebration of London with a tube map as a programme. What better way to celebrate 2012 and the coming of the Olympics? From Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium to Lionel Bart’s ‘Who Will Buy?’ from Oliver!, the night’s performance was not short of variety. It was clear that the conductor David Ogden had put great effort into the programme, and it was certainly worthwhile.

In his introductory talk before The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage concert in Durham Cathedral, conductor Harry Christophers explained that the original idea of their Choral Pilgrimage series was to bring the glories of English church music back into the buildings for which the pieces had been written.

The Tallis Scholars begeistern einmal mehr mit einem abwechslungsreichen und doch stimmigen Programm von Josquin des Prezs bis Nico Muhly.

Au grand complet (49 chanteurs !), le chœur dirigé par Léo Warynski a proposé une sacrée odyssée aux spectateurs des Rencontres musicales de Vézelay, jusqu'à l'immense Concerto pour chœur d'Alfred Schnittke.

Edward Gardner und Mari Eriksmoen verzauberten mit spätromantischen Pretiosen beim „Wintermezzo”-Konzert aus Norwegen.

Pour leur passage annuel à la Salle Gaveau, les King's Singers ont proposé un panorama de la musique anglaise de Byrd aux Beatles (en passant par Britten) : ils ont été royaux !

Gli Angeli Genève ont illuminé les voûtes de la Cathédrale de Genève d’un Thomas Tallis radieux quoi qu’un brin soporifique, servi par un plateau de solistes assez inégal malheureusement.