Choir

This recording has a huge advantage over most of its rivals for the attention of Tallis listeners: the wonderful acoustics of Winchester Cathedral. In this magnificent space, the soaring lines and resplendent harmonies of Tallis's greatest masterpieces find sympathetic resonance, resulting in a heightened dramatic presence that takes the music beyond earthly confines. Of course, beyond the exceptional quality of the writing, credit must go to the phenomenal men and boys of Winchester Cathedral Choir. Where, even in England, does one find trebles who sing with more assuredness, musicality, and beauty of tone? With a repertoire including "In ieiunio et fletu," "Salvator mundi," "In manus tuas," "The Lamentations of Jeremiah," "O nata lux," and the unbelievable 40-part motet "Spem in alium," this is the Tallis disc to own if you're buying only one.

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, is one of the world’s best-known choral groups. Founded in the 15th century, it ranks among the oldest of its kind, and, while originally created for singing the daily services in the college chapel, now enjoys an international tour schedule that has seen it perform all over Europe and beyond. Every Christmas Eve, millions of people tune in to watch the choir’s A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s – a service which has been continuously broadcast since 1928.

Three composers whose contributions to the Anglican choral tradition are rich in historical significance: no less than the Abbey itself, much of this music is inseparably bound up with the national celebrations or commemorations appropriate to war, coronation and royal marriage.

With Van Gogh in Me, the Netherlands Chamber Choir presents an experience in which the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt come to life to the music of the great Romantic and early 20th century composers such as Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Mahler… and, in a world premiere, a transcription for a cappella choir of Satie's first Gymnopédie. Originally written for solo piano, this work, which is known and played throughout the world, finds a new magical and celestial dimension in this new version for choir. Mentioning the name of Van Gogh immediately evokes in each of us a colour, a landscape, a sensation… Hence the idea of creating an immersive audiovisual experience: the choir approached an Italian collective, fuse*, to link images and sounds to the emotions of the musicians and the audience… fuse* developed an algorithm based on the works of Van Gogh and Klimt by recording their styles, colours, brushstrokes… then, during the concert, collects the sound of the choir but also biometric data that analyses the emotional state of the audience, the singers and the conductor, and creates visuals in real time, an astonishing show of colours and shapes that mixes sound, images and emotions… The visual of the album is inspired by these experiments.

Mate saule is Mother Sun – and Peteris Vasks worships her. Any meeting or interview with the Latvian composer is likely to end up with a tramp through the forests or a swim in the Baltic. And much of Vasks’s music is a meditation on the eternal attributes of Nature, in a continuum of life which stretches beyond the fever and the fret of his own fast-changing world. Mate saule is an early choral work, its voices oscillating like the shimmer of a sun slowly rising from the horizon, and lit by flares and fragments of chant. Vasks’s choral music has tended to be instrumental in texture, focusing on the overall mood rather than the specific verbal activity of any text he is setting. The ‘white diatonicism’ of Mate saule gives way to more disturbed, aleatoric harmonies and more disruptive textures as political change and human turmoil take centre stage in the late Eighties in Zemgale, a song about the anguished dilemmas of exile. This is a subject at the very core of the work of the Polish-Lithuanian writer Czeslaw Milosz (now resident in the USA); and the three poems set by Vasks in 1994 receive their world premiere recording. They were originally written for the Hilliard Ensemble: here the excellent Latvian Radio Choir works with concentrated focus on the spare harmonies and elusive metres which recreate the wonder of three transient moments out of time.

The Yekaterinburg Philharmonic Choir (artistic director and conductor Andrei Petrenko) presents Great Music of Small Forms, an album of works by Russian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. These include works by Varlamov and Glinka as representatives of the St. Petersburg school, by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev and Cui (The Mighty Handful), and by Arensky, Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. Whilst these composers were primarily known for their large-scale compositions, here they reveal themselves as consummate masters of the choral miniature, finding their inspiration in the masterpieces of Russian poetry, in folk songs and in salon romances. Listeners will here discover not only world-famous works by these composers but also original choral arrangements of their music that were made especially for this recording.

Riemuitkaamme! is an imaginative and unconventional selection of choral music associated with Christmas as it is celebrated in Finland. Several of the pieces are by Finnish composers - Sibelius, Rautavaara and Madetoja, to name a few - while others have become part of the Christmas traditions of the country despite their international background. Among these Berlioz The Shepherds Farewell and Tchaikovskys Christ, when a Child are quite late additions compared to the medieval hymns Puernatusin Bethlehem, Ecce novum gaudium and Angelus emittitur. All three of these were included in the collection Piae cantiones from 1582, the oldest Finnish music publication. Here, they are performed in settings by various composers from different countries and eras forming a kind of soundtrack of Christmases past and present, distant and close. Contemporary music forms an important part of the activities of the Helsinki Chamber Choir and Nils Schweckendiek, and true to form, the team includes a world premiere recording in their celebrations: Aattoilta, by the Canadian-born composer Matthew Whittall.

Guilty of allowing the sacred fire to go out while declaring her love to the general Licinius, the Vestal Virgin Julia is sentenced to be buried alive. But her execution is averted by a divine intervention, which rekindles the altar flame and absolves the victim. The simple plot of Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale achieved resounding success in 1807 thanks to the highly skilled treatment of the characters’ psychology and the transparency of the political allusions – Licinius is an allegory of Napoleon Bonaparte himself. Yet the work is more than a mere piece of propaganda: it represents one of the links between the tragédie lyrique of the Ancien Régime and the future grand opéra à la française, even anticipating Bellinian bel canto.