Having The Backs of Our Caregivers Strategically Partnering Without Losing Staff

The Choir of Buckfast Abbey presents music for the First Vespers of Our Lady of Buckfast, the Abbey’s patronal feast on 24 May. The Gregorian chant of the Monastic Rite is interspersed with glorious polyphonic works by Felice Anerio, William Byrd and Francisco Guerrero, culminating in the splendid Magnificat Octavi toni by Tomás Luis de Victoria. A thrilling new arrangement of the traditional devotional hymn Hail, Queen of heaven is the climax of this joyous service. Full use of the tonal capability of the Abbey’s Ruffatti organ is made throughout, with a number of liturgical improvisations.

An insightful exploration of the iconic Galápagos tortoises, and how their fate is inextricably linked to our own in a rapidly changing world

The Cold War roots of liberalism’s present crisis

The kaleidoscopic third album from Seán Mulrooney and his Ireland meets Berlin ensemble. Ecstatic folk-psych that full embraces the natural world and living ancestry, through joyful experimentation and deeply rooted sonics.

With their eighth studio album, Simple Things, THE BAND OF HEATHENS came home-geographically, as they returned to their longtime base of Austin for the recording; sonically, in an embrace of the rootsy, guitar-based rock with which they made their name; and thematically, with lyrics that speak to appreciating friends and family and our limited time on this planet.

Long associated with the music of Gabriel Jackson, in 2020 the Choir of Merton College, Oxford and their director Benjamin Nicholas won a BBC Music Magazine Award for their recording of The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a work which grounded its narrative of Christ’s suffering and humanity’s redemption in texts associated with the history of the College.The Christmas Story, again with a libretto assembled by the College’s chaplain the Revd Dr Simon Jones, takes the same approach to tell the story of Christ’s birth. Spanning the period from Advent to Candlemas, it mixes biblical narrative with liturgical texts and four specially commissioned poems by members of the College.The new poems are given to the College’s girl choristers (an independent part of its choral foundation since 2016), while the main body of the work is carried by the full choir and by an ensemble of flute, percussion, strings, saxophone and three trombones – the latter recalling the hieratic sonorities of the seventeenth-century works by Schütz and others which Jackson had in mind while composing The Christmas Story.