Bach B Minor Mass @ St. John's Smith Square
Melanie Eskenazi, Music OMH
23rd December, 2015
This is the 30th Christmas Festival at St John’s, and it has been an exceptional one in terms of variety of repertoire, quality of performance and excellence of soloists. This penultimate evening featuring one of Bach’s greatest works precedes Handel’s Messiah on the 23rd and featured the superb Choir of Trinity College Cambridge and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Stephen Layton, with what can only be called the A-Team of soloists...
...Katherine Watson and Matthew Truscott were a perfect pairing for ‘Laudamus te’ with Truscott’s violin weaving around Watson’s ethereal singing; their interpretation was quite daring, with some edge of seat moments in Layton’s very definite pacing of their performance. Iestyn Davies gave his characteristically expressive phrasing to ‘Qui sedes’ and he and Watson sounded wonderful together in ‘Et in unum Dominum,’ particularly in ‘Deum verum in Deo vero.’...
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Conductor - Stephen Layton
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment,
The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge
SOLOISTS
Katherine Watson, soprano
Iestyn Davies, countertenor
Gwilym Bowen, tenor
Neal Davies, bass
Stephen Layton
St John's Smith Square