Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
#ChoralMarch began with The King’s Singers performing Tallis’ “Spem in Alium”, so it seems appropriate as #MarianMay comes to an end to return to The King’s Singers and another work of the…
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…
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,…
It is 76 years since 19 men, including my mother’s uncle, were killed by a mine washed up at Mullaghduff / Ballymanus in the Rosses. Here is a post on…
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…
A while back I featured Reinbert de Leeuw performing Liszt’s 1880 “Via Crucis”, which seems to me at any rate proto-minimalist. Here from 1893 is the most recognised precursor of…
“Totus Tuus” was the motto of Pope John Paul II, an allusion to St Louis de Montfort’s formula of total consecration to Our Lady. Appropriately the late Polish composer Henry…
Séamus Sweeney 