The Choir Boys

This 2014 Hyperion collection of 22 hymns sung by the Choir of Westminster Abbey is a straightforward presentation of familiar versions for choir and organ. For the most part, the arrangements are conventional four-part settings, with occasional interpolations of seldom-heard harmonizations and descants, and the performances by the men and boys are appropriately reverent and joyous. The majority of selections are hymns of praise, including Praise, my soul, the king of heaven; Thine be the glory; and Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, though Drop, drop slow tears; I bind unto myself today; and Let all mortal flesh keep silence bring a more somber and penitential mood to the program. The recordings were made in late 2012 and early 2013 in Westminster Abbey, so the sound of the album is typically resonant and spacious, and the choir has a well-blended tone, though the trade-off for the glorious acoustics is a loss of clarity in some of the words.

Bach's St John Passon shows the composer's towering imagination at its most intensely dramatic, moving and vivid. Christ's trial and death are retold by soloists acting as participants in the event but also meditating upon it in reflective arias; the choir's role alters from rowdy mob baying for crucifixion to that of a congregation singing quiet, redemptive chorales. Criticised in its day for being too operatic, the work is now revered for its originality, for its faith and above all for its incomparable beauty of musical thought. The new reading is a testament to the vitality of the choral tradition: all soloists are former or current members of New College Choir. It also presents a new level of authenticity, not only with period instruments but also with boys's voices as Bach would have used at St Thomas in Leipzig.

Decca's 2015 limited-edition box set of the complete Argo recordings of the King's College Choir of Cambridge, directed by David Willcocks, consists of 29 CDs spanning the period from 1957 to 1973. The albums, presented with their original jacket art, offer some of the choir's finest performances, which include three recordings of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols (1954, 1958, 1964), anthems by Gibbons, Blow, and Handel, masses by Byrd, Taverner, Haydn, Tye, and Blow, and other great choral works by Bach, Allegri, Palestrina, Tallis, Vivaldi, Howells, and Vaughan Williams. The choir is world famous for its purity of tone and beautiful blend, and under Willcocks' masterly direction it became the exemplar of British choral singing, unmatched by any other ensemble of men and boys.