Tarik O'Regan - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

• His 2006 debut disc, VOICES (Collegium Records COL CD 130), recorded by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, was released to critical acclaim, heralding O’Regan as one of the most original and eloquent of young British composers (The Observer, London), breathing new life into the idiom (The Daily Telegraph, London). International Record Review declared the recording a committed, persuasive and highly accomplished performance of an exceptional composing voice of our time, while BBC Music Magazine gave the disc a double five-star rating.

• After the June 2006 premiere of Scattered Rhymes at the Spitalfields Festival, Geoff Brown, in The Times (London), described O’Regan’s gift for lyric flight boundless. You might have to reach back to Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, or even Tallis, to find another British vocal work so exultant.

• Scattered Rhymes (2008), O'Regan's first disc from Harmonia Mundi, was described as a stunning recording (BBC Radio 3 CD Review), exquisite and delicate (The Washington Post), a fascinating disc (The Daily Telegraph, London) and typically unfaultable (BBC Music Magazine).

• The 2008 release of Threshold of Night marked O'Regan's international breakthrough. The disc debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard chart and garnered two GRAMMY nominations in 2009 before going on to receive wide critical acclaim.

• The 2010 BBC Proms premiere of Latent Manifest performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Litton, was widely reviewed in London: personal canvas, taking us a long way from a literal reworking into the realms of evanescent fantasy, with delicately evocative results (The Guardian, London), ...a beguiling response to response itself – a mirage of intimations and allusions to own experience of hearing Bach’s third solo Violin Sonata (The Times, London), a gracefully-controlled meditation on a single Bach phrase (The Independent, London).

• The premiere production of O'Regan's first opera, Heart of Darkness (2011), opened to largely positive reviews, both in print an online. Anna Picard described the opera as an "audacious, handsome debut" in The Independent on Sunday and Stephen Pritchard, in The Observer, explained that "the brilliance of opera lies in its ability to convey all that horror without the compulsion to show it – the ultimate psychodrama – and to employ music of startling beauty to tell such a brutal tale". Pritchard also described the music as "a score of concise originality". For a full account of the critical response to the opera, see Heart of Darkness (opera).