Colin Britt

Reviews:

“The rest of the program consisted of work by living Americans, beginning with a quartet of songs by four different composers ranging in age from mid-20s to early 50s. …The young Colin Britt’s As There Are Flowers, a setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s To Kathleen, is quiet and slow, with a deliberate, hushed tune that mirrors its text of loving devotion with warmth and directness. All four of these songs were sung masterfully, and the overall effect was to be impressed by the amount of first-rate choral writing being created by living American composers.” – Greg Stepanich, Palm Beach Arts Paper

“Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘To Kathleen’ provides the poetic conceit for Colin Britt’s As there are flowers, and his setting of the exquisite lines ‘Beauty that may not die as long / As there are flowers and you and song’ luxuriates in the simple efficacy of the text. Seraphic Fire’s rendering of Britt’s music reflects the ethos of both music and words, and the firmness of the choir’s singing at the top and bottom of the compass creates a foundation upon which the ingeniously-sculpted harmonies are built with razor-sharp accuracy.” – Joseph Newsome, Voix des Arts

“The next piece, the third premiere of the evening, was Colin Britt’s The Agony and Ecstasy, a gorgeous setting of a poem by thirteenth century Persian Sufi mystic, Rumi. Britt’s writing here is rich, lyrical and lush; the whole chorus became often as fully sensuous as a Romantic symphony even as individual voices – both singers’ and sections’ – retained individual lines and identities, each embodying different kinds of love and yearning. In some ways, Britt’s choral writing in The Agony and Ecstasy represented the most conservative and therefore traditionally accessible music of the evening, but the freshness of his ability to make delicacy and lushness such close partners in presenting Rumi’s mystical desire-paradoxes was thrilling.” – Jean Ballard Terepka, reviewing C4 for TheaterScene.net

“…Once it gets going, the orchestration is really kind of genius… and the tenors get a descant line that might have been stolen from the Brahms German Requiem…” –NPR Pop Culture Hour podcast, referencing choral/orchestral arrangement of “Call Me Maybe”

“[Cabaret is] so bloody well conceived, directed, acted, sung, and danced. Everybody involved in this production makes it work.  …Colin Britt’s musical direction is remarkable (yet again); his marvelously precise ensemble can raise the heat and chill to the bone in frighteningly swift succession.” -Gil Gigliotti, Connecticut Wit

Interviews:

Feature by Amber E. Hopkins-Jenkins in Rutgers Today about America’s Got Talent and beginning doctoral studies at Rutgers.

Interview on CCTV (Chinese national television) about Hartford Symphony and Chorale’s performance of Yellow River Cantata.

Chorus America interview about the video of our classical treatment of “Call Me Maybe.”