to Gareth.t

The idea of an afterlife has fired imaginations across cultures for millennia and is one of the earliest belief systems in recorded history. It is fascinating to consider that a type of identity or stream of consciousness might exist in the absence of the physical body.

Renaissance polyphony is generally held to be stately, calm, reassuring. But this pro- gramme of Palestrina’s six-part Missa sine nomine, complemented by five of his motets and three by Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1535/36–92), was recorded after the Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, had undertaken a tour of Israel and Palestine. There the music and its texts (‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’) took on an extraordinary poignancy, with the dispossession and desperation of thousands of years ago animating the restrained dignity of Palestrina’s counterpoint with an unexpectedly topical intensity.

SOMM Recordings continues its widely acclaimed championing of the music of Charles Villiers Stanford with a captivating collection of his Children’s Songs by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately and baritone Gareth Brynmor John, accompanied by pianist Susie Allan.

The choir which David Trendell directed for twenty-two years pays tribute in a collection of specially chosen pieces by Davids colleagues, friends and former students, interspersed with the Renaissance polyphony which was Trendells area of scholarly expertise. His deep love for the Song of Songs has inspired many of the inclusions, and its nature imagery threads through the disc, adding a suggestion of renewal and rebirth to the memorial tone of works written in the difficult months after his untimely death.

For the opening of the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, Krzysztof Penderecki set to music the text of the Ekecheiria (Truce) Agreement, agreed in 884 BC to ensure the peaceful running of the Games. In 2022, Munich celebrated and commemorated the 50th anniversary of the ""cheerful"" Games, which unfortunately ended in tragedy. In this context, Fumio Yasuda was commissioned to once again set Ekecheiria to music as a mirror of those events. The result is seven compositions for voices and bass clarinet based on IOC President Avery Brundage's controversial demand ""The Games Must Go On"", interspersed with sound bridges entitled ""Ekecheiria"" by Gareth Davis.

Manuel Cardoso (1566–1650) was one of the most important composers of the golden age of Portuguese polyphony around the turn of the seventeenth century. But modern choirs have been surprisingly slow to explore the rich legacy of his compositions: this is the first recording of his Missa Secundi Toni, and the first of any of his works with brass consort, its dark colours providing an effective contrast with the young voices of the Girton College Choir.

New Zealand composer Gareth Farr wrote his cello concerto after discovering some family history. His three great uncles left New Zealand to fight in France in World War I. All three were killed within weeks of arrival. Farr’s concerto is instantly accessible and is a dramatic and emotional statement.

Tom Cawley is one of the UK’s leading jazz pianists. He has performed worldwide - in major clubs, venues and festivals – with some of the country’s leading artists, most notably Peter Gabriel, with whom he has also recorded two albums and a live DVD. As an artist in his own right he has performed, recorded and broadcast extensively over the last ten years.