News & Reviews
Podcast for Guildford Shakespeare Company
Jeremy had the wonderful privelege of appearing on the Guildford Shakespeare Company podcast. Click here to listen to the podcast.
[VIDEO] You’ll never walk alone
[VIDEO] Carol Concert 2020
[VIDEO] Salisbury Community Choir involved in Salisbury Anthem
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 […]
Mahler: Resurrection Symphony Concert Reviews
A selection of reviews from the highly successful Vivace Chorus performance of Mahler: Symphony No.2 & Bruckner: E minor Mass at Guildford Cathedral on the 11th November 2017. Robert Benjafield Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is one of those works which, when sung and played with passion, is a truly visceral experience. […]
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 […]
Gearing up for triumphant performance of Mahler 2
Mahler Symphony No.2, ‘Resurrection’ Why, for a flagship Vivace Chorus concert to celebrate my 60th birthday, would I select a work which has only about 15 minutes of choral singing at the end of the Symphony? Simply, because they are some of the best 15 minutes in the choral repertoire, […]