Choir & Organ 2021

Dubai-based British composer Joanna Marsh has a growing international reputation for new works across many genres. Here, the choir of her alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, with their director David Skinner celebrate her recent position as composer-in-residence of the college with this new album of choral and instrumental works, including a number of premiere recordings.

This series marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, which falls in 2024. It’s dedicated to Bruckner’s symphonies, all recorded in new transcriptions for organ by Hansjörg Albrecht. The third recording was made on the impressive organ of London’s Westminster Cathedral. A bonus track on each volume will be a brand new composition for organ that references Bruckner the composer. Two or three volumes will be released each year, with the project reaching its conclusion in 2024. Hansjörg Albrecht is – besides Ton Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki, Martin Haselböck and Wayne Marshall – one of the few artists who are regularly present internationally both as conductor and concert organist. He is considered a musical innovator and lateral thinker without fear of contact.

Composed in 1982, Arvo Pärt’s Passio has retained its place as one of the foremost works of sacred music of the late 20th century. It has been called a minimalist masterpiece, and is a seminal work in the composer’s oeuvre – the culmination of his so-called tintinnabuli style, and the first in a line of large-scale choral works on religious themes. Passion settings have a long history, with polyphonic settings for choral performance beginning in the 15th century and continuing up until the high baroque and the monumental works by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Alexander Campkin is renowned as a leading young choral composer who has been commissioned by some of the most prestigious musical organisations in Britain. True Light reveals the energy and majestic sound world that he commands, as well as qualities of reflective intimacy. His Missa Brevis was inspired by seeing a beam of sunlight pierce a cloud of moving incense, the resultant music being built around a sustained pitch, ebbing and flowing. In The First Kiss, he sets two poignant and daring Epigrams by the Greek philosopher Strato.