Westminster David Hill a Ceremony of Carols

Victoria was the greatest Spanish composer of the late Renaissance. Compared with the prolific Palestrina the number of his works is not great; compared with Byrd, Victoria’s music is not so varied or wide ranging. Indeed, placed beside the enormous output of Lassus, Victoria’s achievement seems to be very restricted; there is none of the dazzling virtuosity and broad culture, none of the extraordinary diversity. Yet, in its narrow specialization in strictly liturgical or devotional function, Victoria’s music is not only the most perfectly suited to its purpose, but the most perfectly styled and fashioned of its kind, its emotional heart perfectly in accord with Roman Catholic liturgical ceremony in the Tridentine Rite. Even more than Palestrina’s, Victoria’s art is an expression of Catholicism as defined by the Council of Trent.

It is my opinion that Jean Langlais has written some of the noblest, richest and most awe-inspiring sacred music there has ever been. He wrote more organ music than J. S. Bach, and most of it is as suitable for liturgical performance as sung music. His style is a powerful mixture of chant-like motifs (including actual quotations from Gregorian chant), organum, and bold dissonances that give way to pure, radiant tonality. He draws on a wide range of expressions too, from radiant and blazing to quiet and ecstatic. He was truly a craftsman of the highest calibre, and a credit to the distinguished musical heritage of his native France.

A wonderful collection of the favourite and most popular carols for the Christmas season, performed by the world-famous Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. This collection comes with additional core-classical Christmas music by Berlioz, Bach, Britten…

Stephen Paulus was an astonishingly prolific fixture of the American music scene, with some 600 works to his credit. His sudden death in 2014 left classical music—particularly the worlds of opera and choral music—significantly the poorer, so it’s inevitable that we should see his legacy memorialised with new additions to the catalogue. Royal Holloway’s ‘Calm on the Listening Ear of Night’ sets Paulus’s music in dialogue with another Midwestern composer, René Clausen. It’s Clausen whose musical personality emerges most strongly here in these precise performances. His works offer a distinctively American spin on the fashionable Baltic sound world of Ešenvalds and Vasks that is as appealing as it is generous. In pace, which opens the disc, offers eight minutes of lushly filmic excess.

Schütz’s ‘Christmas story’ is an absolute delight from beginning to end, its charming tableaux of angels, shepherds and wise men completely belying the composer’s old age and constrained circumstances. Here it’s the jubilant climax to a programme of Christmas motets from the 1640s.

'Carmina Burana' stands tall as one of the great 20th-century masterpieces of choral music. Well-known for it's opening theme "O Fortuna," the work has garnered critical acclaim since it's inception in the 1930's. Carl Orff composed the material from a collection of 13th-century Latin and German poems written by Benedictine monks in Beuren and the melodies are at times tender, full of beauty, yet scandalous in nature.

Several new versions of Tye’s Missa Euge bone have appeared since the Winchester Cathedral Choir first released this disc of Tye’s Cathedral music in 1991. However, and notwithstanding Jeremy Summerly’s splendid Naxos offering with the Oxford Camerata, in my view none matches the Winchester recording for sheer vitality and sonic brilliance.