Hallé, Hallé Youth Choir, The Manchester Grammar School Choir, Sir Mark Elder, Jamie Phillips
If you missed Tarik O’Regan’s acclaimed chamber opera Heart of Darkness, here’s a welcome opportunity to hear some of its luminous beauty. O’Regan has taken his majestic, brooding score for Tom Phillips’s subtle retelling of the brutal Conrad story and made a suite for orchestra that glows with the same jewel-like warmth that pervades the title piece on this disc, A Celestial Map of the Sky. Bright young voices bring both energetic and ethereal life to the poetry of, among others, Whitman and Hopkins, describing Earth’s relation to the infinite heavens and movingly reminding us to look beyond the boundaries of this weary world.
Stephen Pritchard, The Observer
The other star player on this recording is the Hallé Orchestra itself, illuminating with passion and precision the bright colours of O’Regan’s immensely enjoyable and refreshing sound world.
Pwyll ap Siôn, Gramophone Magazine
A whorl of vivid orchestral colour and sizzling rhythms.
Angus McPherson, Limelight Magazine
This is a good sampling that shows the range of O’Regan’s work; performed by the venerable Hallé Orchestra, these would seem pieces that are soon to enter a great many orchestral and choral repertories. Highly recommended.
James Manheim, AllMusic
O’Regan quickly leads us on an exhilarating reinterpretation of the original material. The brassy, and expertly prepared, peroration five minutes in had me clutching the arms of my sofa in delight. The programme ends with Fragments from Heart of Darkness, a suite extracted from O’Regan’s chamber opera Heart of Darkness, based upon the novel by Joseph Conrad. The piece, the most substantial in the programme, works in a way that opera suites don’t always manage—we are not merely presented with a bouquet of nice moments from the larger work, but a composition that contains a thrust and narrative drive of its own. It’s not unlike listening to a Strauss tone poem; it is vividly pictorial and contains a circularity (we begin and end in the same place) familiar from, say, An Alpine Symphony. In any case it provides an excellent conclusion to this splendid and highly recommended programme of music.
Christian Morris, Composition Today
Tarik O’Regan’s music has appeared upon some thirty recordings, but NMC’s CD, A Celestial Map of the Sky, is the first entirely devoted to his orchestra music. The disc supplies an excellent overview of the British composer’s work. A Celestial Map of the Sky marks itself as a special project in O’Regan’s catalog. Recommended.
Christian Carey, Sequenza 21