Choral

Orchestral and choral arrangements of rock songs have been a curious subgenre ever since the mid-'60s when Andrew Loog Oldham arranged The Rolling Stones Songbook for syrupy strings, but The Kinks Choral Collection stands apart from the pack for the simple reason that it's not the project of some associate or admirer, but rather chief Kink Ray Davies. His very presence as arranger and lead vocal means The Kinks Choral Collection isn't nearly as stuffy and middlebrow as so many of these orchestral rock albums; he manages to inject some semblance of rock & roll by pushing the songs forward with guitar, and letting the rhythms swing instead of plod.

A programme spanning the variety and sheer emotional range of Stanford’s Anglican choral music (with a notable contribution from Owain Park in the Fantasia and Toccata for organ). You are unlikely to hear quite so stirring a rendition of ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ for some time to come…

The catalyst for this disc came with the chance discovery of a vocal score of Berkeley’s Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons. Not ever having heard of the piece, I saw the forces it is scored for and thought it fit rather well the remit of the LCS. A little research soon revealed that the piece had never been recorded, nor was there anything of a performance history either. I could tell there was a piece of real merit and substance here, and it most definitely deserved an outing. All this coincided with the arrival of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown. Planning live performances was impossible but working towards a recording further down the line seemed doable. January 2021 came and we – like so many others – had to cancel the planned recording. By January 2022, the project finally happened. I would like to add my personal thanks to the Lennox Berkeley Society, who have been so helpful and supportive since my very first email to them, not to mention patient as the pandemic forced recording plans to keep being postponed.

On this essential new release, sacred and secular choral works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – many of them never recorded before – are performed by the London Choral Sinfonia directed by Michael Waldron, with James Orford at the organ. The music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor has for too long been neglected despite being of exceptional quality. When Michael Waldron began to explore Coleridge-Taylor’s choral music, he was struck by the sheer variety and depth of skill he found – and that this music is not more widely known. This release brings together a representative selection of both sacred and secular works by this great British composer, from the simple, understated tones of Whispers of Summer, to the quasi-cantata grandeur of Now late on the Sabbath Day.

The precise moment that Holst's career hit its apogee can be fixed in history as October 7, 1925, the day his Choral Symphony, setting texts by Keats, was premiered in Leeds. Since the public premiere of The Planets in 1920, Holst had been England's most popular living composer. He was mobbed by his fans at the premiere, but its repeat in London with the same performers three weeks later bored critics and put the audience to sleep. From that moment, Holst's career started to slide and he was soon eclipsed by William Walton as England's most popular living composer.

Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines a worldwide career as a pianist with those of composer and writer. "My father said that I had memorised seventy nursery rhymes by the age of two. This sounds suspiciously like parental exaggeration to me, but I do know that such singing was my first form of musical expression, especially as we had no classical music in my childhood home. Then, by the age of six, the piano took over… but song remained in the background." "My first twenty years were filled with composing. Then followed almost twenty years of blank paper, writing virtually nothing except concert transcriptions for me to use as encores. Until, in my early 40s, I returned to composition with a passion…" This release celebrates Hough’s compositional output in works for choir and organ performed by the London Choral Sinfonia, with organist James Orford and conductor Michael Waldron.

This collection of short choral pieces by Johannes Brahms is an unusual one in present times, partly because many of the choral parts are quite demanding. For a choral club in the 19th century, however, it wouldn't have been so novel, and there are great beauties on offer here. After the fetching Ave Maria, Op. 12, the rest of the program is dense, metaphysical, and, with the partial exception of the Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53, concerned with death. There are two funeral songs, and two more about fate, and this is not the warm, humanistic Brahms of the German Requiem, Op. 45. The performances are profound and dignified, and the overall effect uncanny. The Warsaw Philharmonic Choir under choirmaster Henryk Wojnarowski has a gorgeous rich tone that is undiminished by the long lines of the music, and the Alto Rhapsody achieves real grandeur in the hands of contralto Ewa Wolak. But the real credit goes to the Warsaw Philharmonic and conductor Antoni Wit, who keep a consistent level of tension and momentum in difficult, dark material like the somber Nänie, Op. 82 (Funeral Song), a rarely performed late Brahms masterwork.