The Choir of The Queen's College Oxford That Sweet City

That Sweet City brings together two evocative British choral works—Kenneth Leighton’s "Veris Gratia" and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s "An Oxford Elegy"—in a beautifully atmospheric recording by The Choir of The Queen's College, Oxford, with Britten Sinfonia under Owen Rees’s sensitive direction.

That Sweet City brings together two evocative British choral works—Kenneth Leighton’s "Veris Gratia" and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s "An Oxford Elegy"—in a beautifully atmospheric recording by The Choir of The Queen's College, Oxford, with Britten Sinfonia under Owen Rees’s sensitive direction.

The Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford celebrate the works of choral music icon Herbert Howells in a disc that sets his works alongside pieces that they inspired and influenced – such as Nico Muhly’s Like as the Hart for choir, solo violin and percussion – as well as works that in turn influenced him. The disc features two world premiere recordings by David Bednall: settings of two Marian antiphons Alma redemptoris mater and Ave regina caelorum that ‘complete’ the partly-lost set of works that Howells wrote for Westminster Cathedral.

The Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and its Precentor Matthew Martin make their debut on Linn Records with their upcoming album Philips & Dering: Motets.

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.

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.

Could the definitive recording of the best-loved of all Orthodox choral works come from an Anglican chapel choir? Delphian’s Paul Baxter thinks so.

Jheronimus Vinders (fl.1525/6) is best known for the oft-recorded lament on the death of Josquin Desprez (d.1521), O mors inevitabilis, which has led many to presume that he was a disciple or even a pupil of the great master.
Now that his surviving works have recently been published in a modern edition, we are better able to place him among his contemporaries. He belongs to a rather small group of Flemish musicians who form the link between the Josquin generation and that of the mid-sixteenth century, featuring composers such as Clemens non Papa and Crecquillon.
He boasts a wonderfully imaginative ear with a preference for dark sonorities, and his music often surprises and delights. This is the first recording devoted to a selection of Vinders's works along with the polyphonic models that inspired them.

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 Patterson, for the rare combination of choir with electric guitar.

The Sidney Sussex College Choir is one of the centuries-old ensembles at the University of Cambridge established to sing for chapel services.