Poulenc's Gloria

Sacred music was never meant to be this much fun! ‘Part monk, part hooligan’ was how one contemporary described the French composer Francis Poulenc, and they might have been talking about his Gloria, too: a huge, irreverent shout of joy for a great chorus. The City of London Choir joins the RPO and conductor Daniel Hyde to raise the roof today; first, though, there’s another choral blockbuster from France (this time by Lili Boulanger), music reminiscent of a holiday in Provence from the composer of Carmen and Debussy’s beautiful moonlit serenade. We also hear not one but two musical letters from America. Everyone loves the deep emotion of Barber’s Adagio – but when you hear soprano Sally Matthews sing Knoxville, his tender memoir of a vanished youth, we think you’ll fall in love all over again.

Her ‘singing – first eloquent, then hysterical; initially refined, before soaring with an ecstasy wrought from liquid fire – was in a category that “virtuosic” doesn’t begin to cover.’ Richard Bratby on Sally Matthews in The Spectator, June 2023