Vasari Singers
Vasari Singers’ 40th Anniversary
In 2020 Vasari are marking our 40th year of music-making under founder-conductor Jeremy Backhouse. In a year-long programme that celebrates the best of British choral music, 2020 will feature a CD launch of contemporary choral music, a gala anniversary concert, a come-and-sing workshop featuring 40-part music for 40 years, and […]
Rachmaninov: All-night Vigil – CD Review
***** This recording of Rachmaninov’s beautiful All-Night Vigil is the third by non-Russian choirs to come my way in less than a year. It’s good to report that the latest, from the Vasari Singers under Jeremy Backhouse, is every bit as excellent as we have come to expect from that […]
Michael Hurd: Choral Music Vol.1 – CD Review
**** (4 stars) Michael Hurd’s Night Songs of Edward Thomas is the finest setting I’ve ever heard of that songful but somehow musically resistant poet. Thomas’s words call for very careful setting and singing, and the Vasaris do both composer and poet proud. There is a Missa brevis, too, which […]
Launch of new CD of Rachmaninov ‘All-night vigil’
The Vasari Singers’ and my association with Rachmaninov’s All-night vigil stretches back nearly forty years, pretty much to the earliest days of the choir, when we would often include in our mixed-bag programmes the evergreen ‘Bogoroditse D’evo’. It was to become a firm favourite, to such an extent that we […]
Handel: Dixit Dominus & Bach: Motet – Concert Review
**** London Evening Standard, 4th November 2016 St Peter’s, Eaton Square, an imposing neoclassical church in the heart of Belgravia, has been hosting chamber music concerts for ten years. With its bright, welcoming interior and generous acoustics it’s a delightful venue, just five minutes from Victoria, and one I wish […]
CD Review: Under the Shadow of His Wing – The Guardian
Seductively lush 4 out of 5 Stars Vasari Singers launch their own label with this wide-ranging, evocative double-CD meditation on the journey from darkness to light, a reworking of the Vespers service by Jonathan Rathbone, who takes texts from the liturgies of Compline and Evensong and applies double and sometimes […]
Vasari Singers launch new CD label
On 6th November, at a concert of this work in St Alban’s, Holborn, London, the Vasari Singers will launch their new CD label with a double CD recording of Jonathan Rathbone’s extraordinary a cappella work, ‘Under the shadow of His wing’. Commissioned by the Vasari Singers and first performed in […]
Five fabulous reviews for Vasari’s ‘De Profundis’ CD
Gramophone The thesis of this disc isn’t a new one but it is always a welcome approach and has been originally addressed. It couples two settings of three texts – the *De Profundis*, the *Miserere* and the Requiem – in contrasting pairs. The most startling contrast, surprisingly, does not involve […]