this performance exerts a gripping hold on the listener. The recording is very much in the demonstration bracket.
The Pengiun Guide – 1000 Greatest Classical Recordings 2011-12
The marvellous thing about having this rarity available in this present form and in this largely praiseworthy version is that it opens the possibility of re-hearing and of further discovery, and even of further performances. I therefore welcome it wholeheartedly
International Record Review
As a piece of choral music’, Donald Tovey wrote of the World Requiem, ‘it centres its invention on the voices, and uses the richest colours of the orchestra without deviating from its true centre’. That’s exactly how Botstein brings it off.
American Record Guide
The sound is very fine in stereo, but a true knockout in Super Audio. There is extra detail, and a spaciousness that never loosens the contours of the music.
Fanfare
Leon Botstein directs his gargantuan forces supremely. Chandos’s recording and presentation are exemplary (the latter includes some fascinating photographs and original programmes). Highly recommended.
Choir & Organ
The performance under Leon Botstein, who has become a specialist in early 20th-century obscurities, is very fine. The baritone Gerald Finley has the biggest workload and does it outstandingly well, with exemplary clarity and dramatic presence. He is well-supported by tenor Stuart Skelton and mezzo Catherine Wynn Rogers. The recording is spacious and disentangles the choral lines comfortably.
The Guardian
Requiring monumental forces, A World Requiem inevitably evokes the models of Berlioz’s Requiem and Mahler’s ‘Symphony Of a Thousand’, but Foulds’s language is far from derivative. Imposing chorales and recitatives are overlaid with fastidious microtonal string writing, and when ecstatic lyricism unleashes itself in the closing moments you’d need a heart of granite not to be moved. Here’s an unheralded moment in English music – one not to be missed.
Classic FM
A remarkable rediscovery, then, of one of the defining works of its time 0 and one whose anti-war message still has plenty to tell our own times. It is – and here’s an adjective I can go for years without using – great music, and I urge you to make its acquaintance.
Fanfare
Foulds’s work is as ambitiously all-embracing as Mahler’s Third of Eighth symphonies, and in its way almost as moving as Britten’s War Requiem – though these are spontaneous reactions forged in the light of a first encounter. Posterity’s work starts here but I suspect that her ultimate verdict will be pretty favourable. Calum McDonald’s booklet-notes serve as an invaluable listening aid.
Gramophone