with Delphian Records
Coleridge-Taylor:
Partsongs
Amidst the explosion of choral writing in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s contribution to the all-important genre of the partsong has long remained underappreciated.
The Choir of King’s College London explore a selection of vivid settings of Romantic poetry from Britain and America, full of rich harmonies and poetic sensibility, inspired by subjects ranging from the exquisite beauty of nature to the Victorian fascination with death.
Featuring no fewer than seven premiere recordings in characteristically committed performances from Joseph Fort’s singers, this album adds another piece to the jigsaw portrait of a composer who was a household name in his day and is once more coming into his own.
Briggs:
Requiem
Now in her early thirties, Kerensa Briggs could hardly have enjoyed a more salubrious childhood for a composer of sacred choral music, surrounded by music in Gloucester Cathedral close, singing in choirs and hearing the daily choral services. Briggs went on to study music and sing as a choral scholar at King’s College London, and her music and her understanding of the way the voice works have their roots in this deep immersion.
This recording is the first dedicated to her music, in a portrait programme of premieres. Joseph Fort and The Choir of King’s College London continue to attract widespread critical acclaim, both for the ambition of their recorded programmes and for their polished and mature execution.
Rachmaninoff:
Vespers
Could the definitive recording of the best-loved Orthodox choral music of all come from an Anglican chapel choir? Delphian’s Paul Baxter thinks so.
The young King’s College London voices are bright, responsive and clear, and the recording is intentionally designed to bring out the bell-like phrases that ring through the whole piece. From the first second the sound grabs you and holds you close: it’s punchy, and bold – a new presentation of music we all thought we knew.
In a recording to honour Rachmaninoff’s 150th anniversary, Joseph Fort and The Choir of King’s College London stake their claim to be among the finest choirs in the business.
Nesbit:
Sacred Choral Music
As a young composer, Edward Nesbit was drawn to the rich complexities of contemporary instrumental music; little more than a decade later, he has found himself returning to the inheritance of his early youth as a chorister: the texts of mass, psalms and canticles, and the long centuries of the Anglican choral tradition. Not that there is anything traditional about Nesbit’s music, which synthesises these two heritages into a soundworld that is accessible, full of references yet always recognisably its own voice.
Joseph Fort – his colleague at King’s College London – and organist Joshua Simões and the King’s choir rise to the challenges expertly, while multi-award-winning soprano Ruby Hughes gives the lead in the clarion textures of Nesbit’s Mass.
Paterson:
Say It to the Still World
Multi-award-winning Sean Shibe, widely recognised as the leading guitarist of his generation, joins Delphian regulars The Choir of King’s College London in these beguilingly conceived works by Shibe’s friend and compatriot Lliam Paterson, for the rare combination of choir with electric guitar.
Say it to the still world casts Shibe as Orpheus with his lyre, in a work which draws fragments of text from poetry by Rilke to meditate on language, loss and the transcendent power of song. Elegy for Esmeralda is a rawer, angrier response to grief, while poppies spread – composed especially, like the other two works, for the performers who bring it to life here – is a further testament to art’s ability to reflect and transform the outer world.
Holst:
The Cloud Messenger
In 1910, after seven years of work, Gustav Holst completed his choral-orchestral masterpiece, The Cloud Messenger. But following a disappointing premiere in1913 the piece fell into obscurity, and has received only a handful of performances. This crowning glory from the composer’s Sanskrit period deserves to be much better known. Telling the powerful fifth-century story of an exiled yaksha who spies a passing cloud and sends upon it a message of love to his distant wife in the Himalayas, it is rich in its harmonic language and ingenious in its motivic construction, and points the way to Holst’s next major work, The Planets.
This colourful chamber version by conductor Joseph Fort lends the more tender passages a new intimacy and clarity, while retaining much of the force of the original and laying the ground for a new life in performance.A set of five part songs, completed the year The Cloud Messenger was begun, shows the newly married Holst similarly absorbed by love’s trials and rewards.
Brahms: An English Requiem
Since its London premiere in 1871, Brahms’s German Requiem has enjoyed immense popularity in the UK, in both its orchestral and chamber versions. But the setting we know today is not the one that nineteenth-century British audiences knew and loved. The work was rarely performed here in German; rather, it was almost always sung in an English translation, and was even known by some as An English Requiem.
In its sixth Delphian recording, The Choir of King’s College London revives the nineteenth-century English setting in which Brahms’s masterpiece established itself as a favourite among its earliest British audiences. Under its new director Joseph Fort, the choir is joined by pianists James Baillieu and Richard Uttley, and soloists Mary Bevan and Marcus Farnsworth.
Leighton & Martin:
Masses for Double Choir
In the 1920s Frank Martin, a Swiss Calvinist by upbringing, created a radiant Latin setting of the Mass for double choir, only to return it to the bottom drawer, considering it to be ‘a matter between God and myself’.
It was finally released for performance forty years later, around the same time that the Edinburgh- based composer Kenneth Leighton made his own double-choir setting – a work with moments of striking stillness, delightful to choral singers and yet rarely recorded.
Contrasts and comparisons abound at every point in this fascinating pairing of Masses from the supposedly godless twentieth century, and are brought out to the full by The Choir of King’s College London’s impassioned performances. A short organ postlude by the teenage Jehan Alain, written on retreat in a monastery in 1930, follows like a voluntary concluding the liturgy.
Advent Carols
from King's College London
Every December, over a thousand people attend the Advent carol service in the Chapel of King’s College London, which is repeated over three nights to meet demand.
This album offers a snapshot of one such service, with its characteristic mix of plainchant, seasonal hymns and polyphony old and new. The Great O Antiphons (sung according to medieval Sarum practice) provide the backbone, pointing inexorably towards the Christmas birth.
A brace of premiere recordings centres on composers with personal connections to King’s College, and is complemented by current Professor of Composition George Benjamin’s rarely heard setting of a prophetic text after Isaiah. It intensifies the mood of heightened expectation proper to this very special season, and reminds us that something truly extraordinary is about to happen.