Music to my ears

What the classical world has been listening to this month

Ed Lyon

Tenor

Polyphony is where my heart still resides, and what struck me most when I first listened to Cantara el Alma, a recent recording of works by the Spanish composer Sebastián de Vivanco (1551-1622) by Ensemble Plus Ultra and others, is the sheer quality of the music-making. It’s one to a part, and it’s so impressive to hear a group of people listening so carefully to each other, performing these extraordinary individual lines yet managing to create a perfect blend.

Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI’S Ostinato is one of my alltime favourite discs and inspired me to make my own recording of music from the same period. As the title suggests, ground bass is the basis for it, but what

I really love is its accessibility. It has both a folk quality and an improvisational feel and is really tuneful too – this may sound almost wrong to say, but I like it because it’s not very demanding! It’s like 17th-century pop music, and that really appeals to me.

Bernstein’s Candide is something I’ve not known until recently, and listening to it in preparation for a performance this summer has been really interesting. It’s this extraordinary combination of operatic singing within the texture of a musical, while the orchestral writing is

READER CHOICE

Elizabeth Hannan Pittsburgh, PA, US Can I gently alert BBC Music to next year’s 100th anniversary of the death of the great Victor Herbert, someone deserving a place on any self-respecting list of music’s great all-rounders. After making his name as a cellist, he cut a dash as a conductor, not least here in Pittsburgh, then add to that his entrepreneurial skills and, of course, his compositions – from his Cello Concertos of the late 1800s to the many popular operettas that he brought to the stage over the turn of the century. Surely he is worth a feature? quite bravura. The recording I’ve been listening to is Bernstein’s own from 1989, with Jerry Hadley in the title role – the way we sing changes as time moves on, and it’s been intriguing to hear the differences from what one expects. And also…

I also work as a therapist for people with anxiety conditions, particularly with regards to performing, and I’ve been trying to understand why there are times when we feel comfortable but somehow our body gets hi-jacked and, say, we sing badly. In his Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman gives a really useful insight into how the brain is working and questions some of the assumptions we have about how we interact with the world. It’s a fantastic book.

Ed Lyon is in Elgar’s The Apostles with the Hallé at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 10 June

Anna Prohaska

Soprano

I’ve been singing in Bach’s St John Passion in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. I loved it, but I also felt withdrawal symptoms from the

St Matthew Passion, which has been important to me all my life. So as soon as I got home, I had to put the Matthew Passion on. My two favourite versions are the amazing recording from Nikolaus Harnoncourt – his second, from 2000 – and a wonderful recent performance from French conductor Raphaël Pichon and his Pygmalion ensemble.

Idomeneo has always been my secret favourite Mozart opera, and I recently performed it for the first time. I’m especially gripped by the third-act chorus, ‘O voto tremendo’, where Idomeneo reveals that he has to sacrifice his son to save the island from the sea monster. It’s incredibly dramatic and predates Verdi’s great choruses by 60 years or more.

There’s a great Mexican film composer called Gustavo

‘Hespèrion XXI’S Ostinato has both a folk quality and an improvisational feel’