The
Choir of Queen’s
College, Cambridge is fresh voiced and
lissom. Their clean-limbed approach
is complemented by Guild’s
recording which is not at all echo laden
or dampened but catches a degree of
acoustic immediacy. That’s
important when one considers that the
burden of the disc is A Garland
for the Queen in which the poems
of then living poets were set by ten
of the leading composers of the day.
Walton and Britten were excluded since
they had their own settings elsewhere
in the Coronation. Amongst the poets
were Christopher Fry, Walter de la Mare,
Louis MacNeice and Edmund Blunden –
but also Ursula Wood, James Kirkup and
Clifford Bax.
They start with an
earlier example of more forthright ceremonial,
Parry’s I Was Glad, with organ
accompaniment. Here it’s gentle and
quite reserved – the opposite of, say,
the old Philip Ledger recording. The
Garland was once available on
Gamut sung by the Cambridge University
Chamber Choir under Timothy Brown so
there’s certainly a discographic tradition
here. I enjoyed the verdant Bax – very
little vibrato, a clear-as-spring water
sound – and the shapely diminuendi and
crescendi in the Tippett (easy to exaggerate
these). In the VW they catch the melismas
of silence well and those Tallis-like
string choirs are nicely evoked. The
tonal blend is perhaps at its most impressive
in the Ireland, even though there are
one of two moments of relative weakness
in the lower men’s voices; the Finzi
is not subject to too much in the way
of metrical shifts and its simplicity
emerges intact.
Tarik O’Regan contributes
two pieces of recent provenance. The
organ-accompanied Tu Claustra Stirpe
Regia has a timeless feel and summons
up a continuum of musical feeling whilst
Cantate Domino sports some intriguing
registers and organ colours – essentially
slow moving but also ebullient and sensitive
alternately. We end with Walton’s The
Twelve which he wrote in 1956; punchy
and jazzy in places and very well understood
here.
The texts are here
with introductory notes. Youthful performances,
then, offering a different perspective
on this repertoire.
Jonathan Woolf
