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Music / solosang

Unorthodox music

Modest Musorgskij

Reviews (6)

The guardian

d. 28. Oct. 2021

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By

Andrew Clements (musikanmelder)

d. 28. Oct. 2021

"Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn's approach to this quirky genius is through his piano music and 60-odd songs. They spent a year sifting through them all before creating the sequence that appears on this disc ... They call the result "a cradle-to-grave songspiel", describing the arc of a woman's life, beginning in the nursery, and moving through youth and marriage to final loneliness ... Booth brings each song to life with operatic vividness ... Every one of them becomes a miniature scena, while the piano pieces that Glynn places between them sometimes offer contrast, sometimes reinforcement. The whole thing is a joy, brilliantly conceived and presented with tremendous panache".

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Presto classical

d. 1. Nov. 2021

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By

Katherine Cooper

d. 1. Nov. 2021

"Editor's choice - October 2021: What a breath of fresh air this album is - partly because a good helping of the songs here are relative rarities on disc, and partly because it's so unusual to here a light, bright soprano in better-known works such as the Songs and Dances of Death and Sunless (excerpts from which feature on Booth and Glynn's cleverly-conceived journey from cradle to grave). Booth brings incisive diction and bags of character to everything".

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Jyllands-posten

d. 29. Sep. 2003

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d. 29. Sep. 2003

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Jyllands-posten

d. 23. Apr. 2003

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d. 23. Apr. 2003

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BBC music magazine

2021 Christmas

By

By

David Nice

2021 Christmas

"Choral & song choice: A Musorgsky melange full of surprises ... The surprises come thick and fast ... Her bright soprano can be a bit squeezed in the more conventional love-lyrics, but revels in the unorthodox, and Glynn ranges the colour-palette too. The presentation is both picture- and text-perfect; classy work all round".

The gramophone

2022 January

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By

David Patrick Stearns

2022 January

"Though Mussorgsky's songs haven't lacked for female interpreters over the decades, there haven't been many since Galina Vishnevskaya et al from the Soviet era. The musical and dramatic intricacy of these songs can be a revelation when liberated from the typical Russian basses and the wide vibratos that came with them. Booth's voice is lighter than one is used to in this repertoire but has all of the necessary equipment, vocal and linguistic ... Booth's total immersion allows her to bypass the kind of superficial effects that have made Boris Christoff's recordings age strangely".