Soloists, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Alsop German composer Carl Orff's exotic setting of bawdy texts by unknown mediaeval poets - written in 1935-6, after Orff discovered the texts in JA Symonds's 1884 anthology Wine, Women and Song - has become something of a crossover cantata these days, with a popular appeal bred by TV adverts and the soundtracks of such films as Excalibur and Natural Born Killers . Its lusty strains are delivered with due gusto by the Bournemouth forces under Marin Alsop and soloists led by Claire Rutter and Thomas Randle. Another handsome boxed set, with a plush book offering text, history and much more, brings the third in Channel Classics' outstanding series in collaboration with the Netherlands Bach Society: the B minor mass, just in time for Easter.
Dutch soprano Johannette Zomer leads a fine team of soloists with the society singers under their eminence grise, Jos van Veldhoven, in an ethereal version of this magnificent work, recorded with crystal clarity. Every strand of Bach's long musical life went into this last and largest-scale of his masterworks. Every so often this column lets its hair down from opera to musical, and musicals don't come much better than this 1970 Manhattan drama from Stephen Sondheim, as recorded by the cast of the current Broadway revival.
Raul Esperanza leads a gifted ensemble (doubling as orchestra) as the 35-year-old bachelor around whom the lives of five married couples and three single women pivot in painful depth. Only Sondheim could so cleverly characterise his actors through the instruments they play; only he can so artfully combine human drama with haunting melody.
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