Categories:
Cart 0

Your cart is empty

Ora Singers

The vocal chamber ensemble ORA (the group is ambivalent about the term "choir") takes England's legacy of choral music as a starting point for further creativity rather than simply as a given. In addition to performing Renaissance standards, the group frequently commissions new works and presents them in musically mixed recordings. ORA, as the group writes, "was born out of a belief that we are in a second Golden Age of choral music, comparable with that of the Renaissance." The group has, accordingly, been active in commissioning new music. "We love the choral music that is being written today and we are passionate about commissioning, recording and performing new works," the group writes. ORA aims to commission 100 new works by 100 different contemporary composers within the ten years following its appearance in the mid-2010s. ORA's founder and artistic director is Suzi Digby, who received the Order of the British Empire honor from Queen Elizabeth II in 2009. With a background in music education, she pursues the development of immersive, novel concert experiences. ORA, an ensemble of 18 virtuoso voices, draws its membership from other top U.K. choirs. Unusually, it has announced that its primary focus will be on recordings and on commissioning new music, but not on concertizing. It plans to release two albums per year, generally pairing classics of English Renaissance repertoire with contemporary works that address them and reflect upon them, both musically and in terms of the larger issues that the Renaissance originals addressed. ORA made its recording debut, Upheld by Stillness, on the Harmonia Mundi label in 2016, featuring a performance of the Mass in Five Voices by William Byrd, joined to works by Roxanna Panufnik, Owain Park, Charlotte Bray, and Roderick Williams, that both take up the musical content of Byrd's mass and reflect upon its function among people -- in Byrd's case, Catholics -- living in a time that was hostile to them. In 2019, ORA began a residency at the LSO St. Luke's, the former St. Luke Old Street Church repurposed as a music center by the London Symphony Orchestra. It inaugurated the "Design Series," a concert series inspired by the center's Jerwood Hall, as well as by a new effort to reach varied audiences. ORA planned 2021 appearances at the Oxford Festival of the Arts and the Festival Internationale de Musiques Sacrées, both postponed from 2020. The year 2020 saw an ORA recording of a 40-voice motet by James MacMillan, recorded with Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium. ORA returned in 2022 with the album Stella: Renaissance Gems and Their Reflections. In 2023, the group released Sanctissima, an album featuring music for the liturgical Feast of the Assumption, with chant, Renaissance works, and contemporary music.
© James Manheim /TiVo
Listen

Similar artists

Stephen Layton
Giovanni Gabrieli
Apollo5
Latvian Radio Choir
The Sixteen
Stile Antico
Suzi Digby
The Marian Consort
Contrapunctus
Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
Alamire
King's College Choir, Cambridge
Peter Phillips
I Fagiolini
Tenebrae
The Cardinall's Musick
Gallicantus

Discography

10 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller

My favorites

This item has been successfully <span>added / removed</span> from your favorites.

Sort and filter releases