• The Temple Church Choir gives the world premiere recording of Nico Muhly's Our Present Charter - a brand new fourmovement work commissioned by the choir to celebrate 800 years since the sealing of the Magna Carta. • Directed by Roger Sayer and featuring organist Greg Morris, the recording also features choral works by Parry, Vaughan Williams, Walton, Bairstow, Tavener and Haydn. • The Temple Church Choir, founded 1841, consists of eighteen boy choristers and twelve professional choirmen. • It is still considered to be one of the finest choirs in London, a reputation it quickly gained after it's founding. • The American composer Nico Muhly (b. 1981) received his Masters in Music from the Juilliard School where he studied under Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano. • He also spent several years working for Phillip Glass as a MIDI programmer and editor. • His wide scope of work for soloists, ensembles, and organizations covers multiple genres, including music for film, opera, choral, chamber, orchestral, vocal and electronic forces in solo or combinations there of.
The Glory & The Dream: Choral Music by Richard Rodney Bennett / RBC Chamber Choir
SOMM Recordings
CD
$20.99Jul 20, 2018
Somm Recordings celebrates the sublime choral music of Richard Rodney Bennett – best known to a wider audience for his Academy Award-nominated scores to Murder on the Orient Express and Far from the Madding Crowd – with 11 first recordings and a vivid new recording of his choral masterpiece, The Glory and the Dream. Performed by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, directed by Paul Spicer and with dexterous support from organist Nicholas Morris, The Glory and the Dream features 12 varied and vivacious choral pieces composed over more than 50 years. The album’s striking title work sets Wordsworth’s ode Intimations of Immortality to music that conjures childhood rapture and adult fears with the utmost finesse and feeling and features a fearsomely complex and challenging organ accompaniment. Dating from 1961, the earliest pieces here are Two Madrigals in which Bennett treats the rich ornamentations of the 17th century to a wholly modern perspective. The most recent work, One Equal Music – a sinewy, austere anthem with a serene ending – was completed in February 2012, just 10 months before the composer’s death at the age of 76. Bennett’s fascination with the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras is also to be found in the elegiac partsong A Contemplation Upon Flowers, the vocal fanfare This Day and Time, a somber meditation on the finality of life and lasting effulgence of Christ’s eternal being, and the simple but affective carol I wonder as I wander. Other seasonal pieces include the early, plainchant-infused The Sorrows of Mary, the gentle ‘hush song’ Lullaby Baby and late, substantial Remember, O thou man, a fervent and heartfelt prayer ending in quiet contemplation. Previous Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir recordings on SOMM have included admired recordings of choral music by Herbert Howells, Samuel Barber and John Joubert, together with partsongs by Ireland, Delius and Stanford.
