Stevie Wishart & Sinfonye perform at the BBC Proms 2011 to great acclaim! Cadogan Hall, 27 August 2011

Hilary Finch, The Times, 29 August 2011

A woman walked down the aisle, playing a wheezy hurdy-gurdy. You never know quite what’s going to happen at a Saturday Matinee Prom. This was Stevie Wishart, composer and the founder-director of the vocal ensemble Sinfonye, and she was celebrating Hildegard of Bingen, the autodidact nun whose singing and writing was, in her own words, “a swaying bridge between heaven and earth”.

The hurdy-gurdy tuned into a solo voice descending the opposite aisle: they converged on stage with the six female singers of Sinfonye, whose sweet, raw, folk-influenced voices pealed out Hildegard’s long, long melodies in chant tinged by bare, spare harmony. They sang a selection from the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, giving joyful and robust energy to melismas which were exquisitely pitched and paced.

...We heard the world premiere of a BBC commission written especially for this concert: Out of this World.

...when the voices of Sinfonye, spread out high in the galleries of the Albert Hall, joined them for the final O eterne Deus, the work finally achieved lift-off...

Alexandra Coghlan, The Arts Desk, 29 August 2011

‘Wishart's Out Of This World more than lives up to its title’

...it is in the final "O eterne Deus" that Wishart finally releases her full forces, adding the female voices of Sinfonye to the BBC Singers to conjure a dense and shimmering cloud of sound that echoed from Cadogan Hall’s galleries, catching different harmonic lights and exposing hidden seams of metallic brilliance. On the strength of this movement alone I’d make the journey to hear this slow-release work for a second performance.

This year’s Saturday Matinees have offered some of the most exploratory programming of the Proms season and this was no exception. A well-conceived programme may have yielded mixed results, but must surely ensure the return of Wishart’s music – surely among the finest of this year’s new commissions – to the festival.

Simon Cummings, 5-against-4.blogspot.com, 30 August 2011

...the whole has a passionate but raw quality that's spellbinding • Wishart softens the intensity ever so slightly towards the end, fixing the singers above a distant drone-like foundation, & ends with an uncanny chorus of sibilance.