CORO Welcomes The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, to the label.

In their first recording for CORO, The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, under the direction of Mark Williams, explore the repertoire that has provided the bedrock of the college’s musical life for the last 500 years, all of which was written for the end of the day.

Much music associated with evening time is naturally calm and soothing, satisfying those seeking transcendental beauty in the form of unchallenging ‘sound baths’. However, this collection also seeks to challenge, contrasting contemporary settings with music from the 16th century. We hope, through this range of works, to capture something of that liminal space between day and night characterized by Evensong and to lead the listener into that ‘peace that passes all understanding’.

The album showcases works by composers from John Sheppard to Joanna Marsh and features much-loved pieces such as Hubert Parry’s Lord, let me know mine end and John Tavener’s The Lord’s Prayer, as well as new additions to the Evensong repertoire such as Grayston Ives’ In pace and Piers Connor Kennedy’s O nata lux.

The acclaimed Magdalen College Choir celebrates the diversity of the twentieth-century English carol repertoire in a programme that combines well-loved standards and innovative choir favorites ranging in emotion from quiet contemplation to festive joy. The selection of carols and organ solos, led by director and organist Daniel Hyde, culminates in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s celebrated Fantasia on Christmas Carols with renowned baritone Roderick Williams in the solo part. Several carols focus on the sheer joy of the miraculous Incarnation itself. William Mathias’s A babe is born is a lively setting which gives full rein to the composer’s syncopated, jazzy parallelisms. Optimism is also the principal mode of Christopher Steel’s People look east. In its ebullient joy, the piece bounces off into a different key in the third verse and deploys the voices in canon, before swinging back to a final recapitulation, replete with a jubilant descant. Composers for organ have found themselves drawn to this treasury of festive folksongs. The French organist and teacher Marcel Dupre was requested by his daughter Marguerite to write a setting of the carol Il est ne le divin enfant. The resulting piece is a set of variations on the theme, with the rune variously in the pedals, decorated, and finally worked into a masterly fugue. In similar fashion, Herbert Sumsion transformed a number of carols into preludes for the instrument. Among them was The holly and the ivy which plucks little motifs from its source before gradually introducing the tune itself, building up to a grand statement before subsiding into quiet peace.