This 2023 release is the third in a series devoted to live Advent recordings by the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge, over the past decade. In some ways, it offers more of what was heard on the first two, and its appearance on classical best-seller charts during the 2023 holiday season suggests that listeners are getting what they want. There is a good mix of traditional, contemporary, and newly commissioned pieces, with Bach organ works as interludes. This has an intriguing effect that jolts the proceedings out of the usual realm of peak Britishness and casts a contrapuntal perspective over much of the music. Yet, there are some factors that make this third volume unique. For one, these recordings were taken from services held between 2020 and 2022 and were thus affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 recordings occurred under severe social distancing rules, and in 2021, director Andrew Nethsingha himself was stricken; organist George Herbert stepped in at short notice. By 2022, Nethsingha had agreed to take up a new post at Westminster Abbey, making the proceedings into a swan song. There is perhaps a certain enthusiasm in the singing of the young choristers, but as for the COVID restrictions, it is hard to hear in the finished product; the engineering of Dave Rowell smooths out any rough spots and creates an appealingly direct sound that doesn't shy from a bit of clanking in the organ. Some of the pieces seem relevant to the upcoming coronation of King Charles, and there are some standout individual works like Judith Weir's Drop Down, Ye Heavens, from Above. In multiple ways, even those who already have the first two releases in the Choir's series will find this a fresh take on the English holiday season in music.© James Manheim /TiVo

The catalyst for this recording came with the chance discovery of a vocal score of Berkeley’s Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons. Not ever having heard of the piece, I saw the forces it is scored for and thought it fit rather well the remit of the LCS. A little research soon revealed that the piece had never been recorded, nor was there anything of a performance history either. I could tell there was a piece of real merit and substance here, and it most definitely deserved an outing. All this coincided with the arrival of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown. Planning live performances was impossible but working towards a recording further down the line seemed doable. January 2021 came and we – like so many others – had to cancel the planned recording. By January 2022, the project finally happened. I would like to add my personal thanks to the Lennox Berkeley Society, who have been so helpful and supportive since my very first email to them, not to mention patient as the pandemic forced recording plans to keep being postponed. Berkeley was not unique in looking to the past for inspiration. Knowing that his Gibbons Variations would require string orchestra, I immediately thought that Warlock’s Capriol Suite might provide a suitable companion on this album. I have fond memories of playing the piano duet version alongside my sister as children. Perhaps unfairly relegated to the realms of school orchestras and amateur groups, the Capriol Suite is a real tour de force and has a surprisingly sparse catalogue of high-level recordings. It is technicolour in each movement’s effects, whilst remaining authentic to the medieval inspiration at its core. The final movement – Mattachins – forever reminds me of the end of Ravel’s La Valse (written six years earlier) as the poise and grace of everything before gradually descends into chaos and self-destruction. The 5 Mystical Songs of Vaughan Williams need little introduction, and their earlier George Herbert texts provide a continued rhythm alongside the Berkeley and Warlock. I had always thought the songs existed in two versions; one being a full, large-scale orchestrated version and the other being a keyboard reduction of said orchestration for piano and/or organ. The obvious practical implications of both versions put heavy parameters around the number of singers, size of venue etc. Despite their huge popularity, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a version existed for string orchestra and piano (with the chorus and baritone solo parts the same as other versions), created by the composer himself. I was not aware this version existed, and the publisher confirmed that it had never been recorded in this arrangement before. I believe these pieces are Vaughan Williams at his absolute best, and whilst the music does not itself need "discovering", I hope this chamber-orchestra version sheds a new light on it. I also hope this version may provide new opportunities for performances from groups of all shapes and sizes, who may want to perform these pieces with forces larger than just a keyboard instrument, but without the huge resources of the version for symphony orchestra. © Michael Waldron/Orchid Classics

The cult of St. Mary Magdalene was in full bloom towards the end of the fifteenth century. Her dramatic story grew from the conflation of three different Gospel women, initiated in the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great and enriched over time by enthusiastic hagiographers. The compelling narrative that coalesced in the late Middle Ages that of a repentant prostitute who followed Jesus as a disciple, witnessed his crucifixion, was the first to encounter the resurrected Christ and proclaim the news to the apostles (hence her title "Apostle to the Apostles"), and who later sailed to Provence to preach and convert, ending her life as a hermit inspired Roman Catholics for centuries. It resonated with scholars and preachers, but also with artists, composers, and simple worshippers, offering them a model to follow and helping them to strengthen their faith. The rich complexity of Mary Magdalene’s character is also reflected in the great variety of her visual representations throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She often appears in beautiful and even exotic dress, holding the alabastrum, the richly decorated jar of ointment with which she anointed the feet of Jesus. Given her biblical role in Christ’s Passion, she is also depicted distraught in heart-wrenching Deposition scenes and in the risen Christ’s presence, but also - following Jacopo da Voragine’s Legenda aurea and other medieval accounts - as a strikingly hirsute penitent hermit. The Den Bosch Choirbooks At the dawn of the Renaissance the southern Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, with its abundance of churches and monasteries, was also referred to as "Little Rome". Central to this religious scene was the Brotherhood of Our Illustrious Lady (Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap), founded in 1318. This devotional organization, which counted among its members the famous painter Hieronymus Bosch, invested considerably in recruiting and employing the best singers and organists for its chapel, which performed a wide variety of polyphonic music. No fewer than nine choirbooks with this repertoire are still preserved by the confraternity, including three manuscripts from the Alamire workshop, which was renowned for creating luxurious music manuscripts for courts all over Europe. These books of polyphony are complemented by a variety plainchant sources, often reflecting local practices. After centuries of silence, this magnificent collection is finally sounding once again. With the five-year project "The Den Bosch Choirbooks" (2020-24), Cappella Pratensis, itself based in ’s-Hertogenbosch, is giving these manuscripts the attention they deserve. The project includes numerous concerts, workshops, publications, lectures and a series of five recordings. It also aims to bring these precious sources to a wider audience through digitization and the production of handcrafted facsimiles, in close collaboration with the Alamire Foundation, International Centre for the Study of Music in the Low Countries (University of Leuven). © Cappella Pratensis

This album is entitled 11,000 Virgins and has been heavily hyped by Harmonia Mundi. And with good reason: the Anonymous 4 have not only garnered high praise for their performances of Medieval and religious music, but at least two of their recordings, Miracles of Sant'iago and On Yoolis Night, have hit the charts, attracting the so-called "crossover" segment among potential buyers. The group's successes are not difficult to understand: their beautiful, mostly unison singing produces a sound that combines a sweet mellowness with a kind of mesmeric serenity. The disc's title refers to the fifth-century legend of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins who, returning from a religious pilgrimage, were said to be slaughtered in Cologne by Attila the Hun when they refused to submit to concubinage. Actually, there may well have been only a handful of virgins accompanying Ursula, exaggeration that often accompanies legend accounting for the possibly inflated number. In any event, the martyrdom of these innocent women moved composers, writers, and clergy to extol them for many centuries to come. Hildegard (1098-1179) wrote several chants inspired by this legend. Seven of the eighteen selections here are hers; the remainder are from anonymous sources, identified in the album booklet listings usually by location, edition and a time. The first track, for example, contains an Antiphon (Auctori vite psalmis) and Invitatory (Venite exsultemus domino) that are attributed to "Karlsruhe LX (13th c.)." The music on the disc spans the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, though there's little stylistic dissimilarity throughout the eighteen pieces. Those by the mystic nun and cononized saint Hildegard of Bingen will, of course, draw the most attention. It is one of the ironies of our age that nine centuries after her birth she has become a cult figure (surely not by her design), with a worldwide popularity surpassing that of many talented artists who have taken great pains to advance their careers and fame. To cite just a few examples of the impressive artistry here, try Hildegard's Symphonia virginum: O dulcissime amator, where this quartet finds a perfect balance between religious ecstasy and seductive vocalism, between reverential solemnity and sonorous beauty. This is truly a compelling performance of an inspired chant, perhaps the best music on the disc. Jesu corona virginum, attributed to the Ahrweil Antiphoner (13th c.), sounds like the precursor to Pange Lingua (Sing, my tongue), traditionally sung on Holy Thursday in the Roman Catholic Church. Whatever the case, the Anonymous 4 deliver it serenely and sweetly. Try also Hildegard's Cum vox sanguinis, where the group conveys a sense of hope and spirituality with soothing yet incisive vocalism. Not only is everything here beyond reproach, but nothing is less than utterly compelling. Excellent sound too, and full texts. Highly recommended. © TiVo

A seasonal follow-up to their resoundingly successful English Ladymass is this unparalleled collection of medieval carols and motets. Anonymous 4 chose from a 13th century antiphoner works illuminating all aspects of the Christmas story and its many accompanying legends. The haunting lines of Gregorian plainchant curve and wind their simple melodies and lead us to the sublime object of this sacred music. The superb voices of these four women interchange melodic fragments and create an ethereal weaving of sounds and dynamics... © MusD /TiVo

After 18 years spent together on the road and in the recording studio, Anonymous 4 decided to call it a day at the end of its 2004 touring season. Sad news for the early music world to be sure, but Anonymous 4 has decided to go out with a bang rather than a whimper, producing as its last scheduled Harmonia Mundi album a second collection of Hildegard von Bingen to go with the group's great first collection, 11,000 Virgins. The Origin of Fire: Music and Visions of Hildegard von Bingen differs from other offerings of a similar kind in that Anonymous 4 develops a context for Hildegard's material, combining it with music that Hildegard and her nuns would have sung with regularity. In addition, Anonymous 4 has set to music, apparently for the first time, some of Hildegard's text-only "visions" by utilizing recitation tones found in medieval sources. One usually finds such music without words, as they are designed to be adaptable for a number of texts within a certain portion of the liturgy -- it is nice that Anonymous 4 has located something to hang onto them so that we may hear these psalm tones in recorded form. The booklet for this release is especially nice, liberally illustrated with Hildegard's visual art and drawings of herbs from medieval books. Susan Hellauer's notes are succinct, elegant, and lay out the concept behind the program in the most comprehensive manner possible without being wordy or obscure. Full texts and translations into four languages are included in a handsome 72-page booklet. The performance of the pieces is, as usual, sublime, with the longer Hildegard works, such as the Responsory O felix anima and her extensive hymn-setting O ignee spiritus, being particularly worthy of comment. The Origin of Fire does not altogether spell the end to Anonymous 4's journey, as the members have agreed to regroup as needed for special projects. As a closer to what has been a stunning career, influencing the entire early music world, one could hardly wish for a better consummation of Anonymous 4's collective talents than this. © TiVo

Midlake already had the bulk of their fourth long-player in the can when lead vocalist and songwriter Tim Smith announced that he was leaving the mercurial Lone Star State indie rockers to start a new project. Smith's shape-shifting songwriting style and idiosyncratic voice guided the band through three very different-sounding records, so it should come as no surprise that 2013’s aptly named Antiphon (a short sentence sung or recited before or after a psalm or canticle), which finds guitarist Eric Pulido at the helm, is both an invocation of past digressions and a stylistic leap of faith. Less heady than 2010’s English folk-imbued Courage of Others, yet retaining its overcast, Fleet Foxes-meets Meddle-era Pink Floyd ambience, Antiphon sounds more like the work of a band and less like the fleshed-out audio installations of a bandleader. Pulido's even-keeled voice and enigmatic lyrics are close enough to Smith's to alleviate any scarring (casual Midlake fans will probably be none the wiser), but his version of the group, while still steeped in the harmony-laden, smoky patina of '70s AOR pop, is less brooding than Smith's. There's a breezy melancholy and a winning, natural compression to cuts like "The Old and the Young," the serpentine title track, and the lush "Aurora Gone," the latter of which sounds the most like something off of their 2006 breakthrough Trials of Van Occupanther, that sets the nervous system at ease, imbuing meatier cuts like "It's Going Down" and the snaky, Calexico-informed instrumental "Vale" with a rich sunset glow that belies their sonic amplitude. To be fair, the band still sounds like they could break into "Breathe" at any moment, but there's a sense of adventure and a vulnerability to Antiphon that suggests that this latest incarnation of the group is more interested in what's beyond the Dark Side of the Moon than it is standing in its shadow. © James Christopher Monger /TiVo

Mass by Bernstein, first performed in 1971, defies classification. It is not really a mass in the strict sense, but more of a kind of deconstruction of a traditional mass; after all, the full title is MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers and the theme resembles a divine service which turns sour before finally discovering universal peace. At the outset, the world seems to be at one, but then "street musicians" begin questioning the need for, or even the very existence of, a god. Cacophony reigns until the cataclysmic elevation of the host, when finally peace breaks out, when the Celebrant brings everyone together around the holy spirit, before intoning a final "go in peace". Bernstein's score brings together all the myriad elements of 20th century music: jazz, blues, rock, Broadway, expressionism, dodecaphonism, modernism with a hint of Britten, street music, fanfares, classical song mixed with rock and jazz voices and Gospel recitations: a veritable Tower of Babel which is hard even to list in a single breath. But Yannick Nézet-Séguin can be trusted to knit all these disparate elements together. Note also that this is a live concert recording, with a breathtaking spatial distribution. Putting history aside, the FBI – never one to miss out on a chance to look ridiculous – decided that Mass was pacifist, anti-establishment propaganda and begged Nixon to boycott its opening night. After all, the work had been commissioned by Jackie Kennedy for the inauguration of the Washington Kennedy Center for the Arts, when America was in the middle of its Vietnamese quagmire...© SM/Qobuz

For those who have never heard the utterly distinctive sound of Norway's all-female Trio Mediaeval, this 2014 release may make a good place to start. The group has developed and honed that sound over several albums in programs featuring chant in several varieties, medieval polyphony, Norwegian folk melodies mostly harmonized in a quasi-medieval style, and contemporary compositions in a neo-medieval idiom. The last of these have been newly composed for the trio. Aquilonis includes unusual examples of each of these categories (such as chant from an Icelandic repertory), but the categories themselves are relatively balanced in comparison with earlier albums. The program develops logically, with broader melodies and instrumental sounds (including a Hardanger fiddle) introduced toward the end. All this leaves the listener free to soak up the eerily effective vocals of the trio, which go beyond a simple blend into some startling harmonic effects. This certainly isn't an authentic performance of medieval music, but neither is it a modern take that uses the simplicity of the music to meditative ends. In a way, it gets listeners closer than almost anybody else to the time when vertical sonorities in European music were new, and for those who have never heard it, it's time to begin.© TiVo

Recordings of chant tend to fall into two groups: those concerned with the beauty of the singing and the singers themselves, and those that attempt to place the chant into something like its liturgical context. This recording by Britain's hot Tenebrae Consort falls somewhere in between. The program consists mostly of a set of chants for the Compline service for Holy Week, drawn from the unusual Sarum chant repertory used in England until the time of the Reformation. For several of the texts, polyphony, in the form of the great Lamentations of Thomas Tallis and a respond by John Sheppard, is added. The general idea of adding polyphony to a sequence of chants fits what would have been done at the time, even if it was Sheppard, rather than Tallis, whose music was associated with the Sarum Office. Musically it all works beautifully. The Tenebrae Consort is pared down to five singers here (four for the chants themselves), and the entire event has an intimate quality, centered on the texts (all reproduced and translated into English in the booklet). And the sound environment of London's small All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak, is strikingly well suited to the aims of the project. Strikingly beautiful, even if it is a little hard to tell what the overarching principle of the program is. © TiVo

Leonard Bernstein's Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers was given a mixed reception upon its premiere as the inaugural production at the opera house of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on September 8, 1971. A double-LP box set recording followed in the fall, and there were performances in several cities the next year, but the work, which mixed popular music genres with classical ones, never attracted a wide following. More than 30 years later, however, three recordings appeared during the first decade of the 21st century, one by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Kent Nagano and made in November 2003; a second by the Tonkünstler-Orchester (the State Orchestra of Lower Austria) conducted by Kristjan Järvi and made in February 2006; and this one by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop and made in October 2008. While these versions are clearly inferior to the one Bernstein himself conducted in 1971, they serve to alert 21st century listeners that the composition is not just a time capsule of its era. That's the way some saw it in the early '70s, when it seemed of a piece with several other musical theater works that attempted to use the Christian religion to comment on the social turmoil of the period, notably Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, the latter written by Stephen Schwartz, who also co-wrote the lyrics to Mass. In each work, the tradition-encrusted tale of Christ's life was contemporized in song with an emphasis on skepticism and even cynicism, sung in vernacular language and expressed musically in styles of rock and pop. Bernstein's version, based on the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass, was the most musically ambitious and eloquent, tracing the ways in which Christian belief could be perverted and questioned. Creating a government-commissioned work, he may have been trying to "catch the conscience of the king," in his case, President Richard Nixon, who failed to attend the premiere. But his and Schwartz's attack on those who use Christianity for their own ends, as expressed in "God Said," with its specious justifications for anti-environmentalism and warmongering, must sound only too familiar to listeners familiar with the policies of President George W. Bush, who was in the White House when all three of the newer recordings were made. Sometimes, it seems the best way to be timeless is to be timely. As such, Alsop, like Järvi and Nagano, had the potential to create a version of Mass that spoke to her own generation as Bernstein attempted to speak to his. In all three cases, that opportunity has been squandered, however, and oddly enough in much the same ways. While the 1971 recording was full of impassioned performances reflecting the ripped-from-the-headlines quality of the writing, Alsop, just like Järvi and Nagano did, treats the work largely as a museum piece, rendering it as though it were some dusty opera, without much conviction. Musically, Alsop, again like Järvi and Nagano, hews far closer to the classical elements in the score, giving only cursory treatment to the pop music parts, which unbalances the work. If new recordings of Bernstein's Mass can reawaken debate about a composition that deserves to be remembered, what it really should do is send the curious back to the initial version. Perhaps a theatrical production handled by people less tied to the classical realm could bring the work back in a more meaningful way. © William Ruhlmann /TiVo

For this 2013 release from Ondine, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, conductor Daniel Harding, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra present three exciting works by Jörg Widmann, a German composer who possesses an impressive talent for orchestration. The Violin Concerto is the most imposing piece on the program, at nearly a half hour in duration and of an exceptionally wide range of techniques and sonorities, and it serves as a powerfully expressive vehicle for Tetzlaff. Long lines predominate, and the tonal inflections of the chromatic writing make it quite accessible to listeners who don't normally listen to contemporary works. Antiphon is a vivid display of the orchestra's sections in call and response, and the interplay of these groups is transparent to the attentive listener and fascinating on repeated listening. The closing work, Insel der Sirenen (Island of the Sirens), was inspired by Homer's Odyssey, and Tetzlaff's violin is pitted against 19 strings, often grouped in cluster formations, in an extraordinary competition of sounds. Because Widmann's music is uncompromising and decidedly adventurous, audiences may find it a bit challenging, though the coherence of his compositions and the freshness of his orchestral colors go a long way toward making this music appealing. © TiVo