The Choir Boys

How much do you like Leonard Bernstein? Carnegie Hall is betting you like him a lot as it has collaborated with Sony to prepare this 10-CD set, The Original Jacket Collection: Bernstein Conducts Bernstein. It contains every album Bernstein made of his own music for CBS Records, beginning with his 1950 recording of the Symphony No. 2, "The Age of Anxiety" – predating his tenure with the New York Philharmonic by nearly a decade – to the ballet Dybbuk in 1974, recorded with the New York City Ballet Orchestra several years after his departure.

Christmas presents a golden opportunity to present brand new music to wide audiences, and the role played by St John’s College Choir in this area has been significant, as demonstrated by new recording of traditional and contemporary choral works. The recording features Michael Finnissy’s John the Baptist, written for the Choir for its BBC Advent broadcast in 2014.

Hyperion’s previous recordings with Winchester Cathedral Choir are among the jewels in its choral collection. Now the label begins a new relationship with this ancient foundation and its latest director of music, Andrew Lumsden. Their new disc features a composer who was at the centre of the English twentieth-century choral tradition.

Following the success of the Westminster Cathedral Lay Clerks in their sumptuous men-only recording of Victoria’s Missa Gaudeamus, the choir returns to full ranks for a further issue in their survey of the Masses of this undisputed Master of the Renaissance. This new recording opens with Victoria’s five-part setting of the Marian antiphon Salve regina, followed by two of the composer’s Masses: Missa De Beata Maria Virgine and Missa Surge propera, which is preceded by its Palestrina model.