Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
Last year I posted a YouTube video of the magnificent setting of the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen) the concludes Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmelites , with the sound of the…
On what would have been my father’s 87th Birthday this poem by Robert Wrigley seems fitting. It captures something of the tension between the worlds of literary endeavour and the…
A whole series of posts of settings of “Stabat Mater” could be made…Pergolesi, Haydn, Dvorâk, Rossini, Poulenc, Arvo Pärt. Here, from his late Four Sacred Pieces, is Verdi’s – which,…
The William Ferris Chorale is a Chicago-based vocal group, specialising in little-performed works by contemporary or Twentieth Century composers. Here they are, however, with a well known composer. Camille Saint-Saëns…
Interestingly, “A Mhuire Mhathair” is not a traditional Irish hymn, but the result in the 1970s of setting an Irish text to the Maori tune Pokarekare Ana :
Joe Heaney was a sean-nos singer born just over one hundred years ago near Carna in Connemara. He sang in both Irish and English, and would contribute to John Cage’s…
From the contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof A Janczak here is a timeless sounding (yet of its time) Ave Maria:
