David Luke

King’s College Choir are the most famous choir in the world. This 29-CD set of the complete Argo recordings celebrates David Willcocks’ tenure from 1957-1973 and includes some of the most beautiful choral music sung with the choir’s trademark richness and purity of sound. Six albums are released on CD for the first time – David Willcocks’ 1964 Festival of Lessons & Carols and Tye Masses and four albums from Boris Ord, Willcocks’ predecessor. Also includes works by Bach, Tallis, Haydn and others.

Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (Tren ofiarom Hiroszimy in Polish) is a musical composition for 52 string instruments, composed in 1959 by Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), which took third prize at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Composers' Competition in Katowice in 1960. The piece swiftly aroused tremendous interest around the world and made its young composer famous. The piece—originally called 8'37" (at times also 8'26")—applies the sonoristic technique and rigors of specific counterpoint to an ensemble of strings treated unconventionally in terms of tone production. "While reading the score," Tadeusz Zielinski wrote in 1961, "one may admire Penderecki's inventiveness and coloristic ingeniousness. Yet one cannot rightly evaluate the Threnody until it has been listened to, for only then does one face the amazing fact: all these effects have turned out to serve as a pretext to conceive a profound and dramatic work of art!" Indeed, the piece tends to leave an impression both solemn and catastrophic, earning its classification as a threnody. On October 12, 1964, Penderecki wrote, "Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost."