• St Cecilia is best known as the patron saint of music, but it may all be a mistake: the ancient accounts that link her to the art have her disdaining the act of making music and “singing to the Lord in her heart”. Still, no one is complaining if she stimulates visions as wonderful as WH Auden’s text, which Benjamin Britten (who was born on St Cecilia’s Day) set as his Hymn to St Cecilia in 1942. “Blessed Cecilia, appear in vision to all musicians/ appear and inspire”, says the text, and Britten’s vocal music refers to the violin, flute, trumpet and timpani – as did Purcell’s setting of Dryden’s A Song for St Cecilia’s Day three centuries earlier.
It’s the centrepiece of a fine new all-Britten disc from the RIAS Kammerchor under Justin Doyle (Harmonia Mundi): idiomatic readings in a quite resonant acoustic, more secure in its full-voiced choruses than in its solos. The challenging Gerard Manley Hopkins settings AMDG have not established themselves as strongly, but if Britten had composed nothing more than the perfect, touching Hymn to the Virgin he wrote when 16, he would be remembered.
• St Cecilia was also at the heart of The Company of Heaven, an ingenious Wigmore Hall concert given last week by the Cardinall’s Musick (Radio 3/BBC Sounds) devoted to music celebrating female saints. Among the resurrections, two settings of Cecilia’s antiphon Cantantibus organis by Marenzio and the totally unknown Daniel Torquet were outshone by the sheer splendour and sonic glory of Cecilia Virgo by Peter Philips. Strongly profiled singing under Andrew Carwood.
• It’s good to see the great historical ensemble Concentus Musicus of Vienna reinventing itself after the death of its founder Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and marking out some different territory on disc under his successor, Stefan Gottfried (Aparte Music). Performing Webern’s 20th-century orchestrations of Schubert songs on 19th-century instruments is pretty postmodern, but Florian Boesch’s baritone is beautifully light and airy. And the attempt to finish Schubert’s famously Unfinished Symphony (by completing his Scherzo sketch and adding a movement from his Rosamunde music) is vigorous and convincing.
