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Reviewer: Edward Breen The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, directed by Graham Ross, explore music for Corpus Christi through the hymns of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The programme forms part of their series of music for the liturgical year and traces a long arc from Josquin to the present including works by Victoria, Bairstow and Messiaen. Josquin’s Missa Pange lingua is sung tenderly with a bright, luminous tone. These young singers display an impressive sense of style but there are a few awkwardly metrical moments where the bar lines of modern notation pervade their phrasing. The ‘Pleni sunt caeli’ duet is beautifully executed despite several overly manicured dynamic contrasts. Although I prefer fewer voices in Josquin’s polyphony, this is one of the best choral performances of this Mass on record. There is little doubt that this choir has an enviable appetite for 20th-century music and they are at their strongest in the two French settings of O sacrum convivium by Villette and Messiaen. Following this, Francis Grier’s atmospheric setting of Panis angelicus, in memory of musicologist and conductor David Trendell, is something of a show-stopper. Lower voices form a rich, sonorous drone chord, from which the tentrils of solo soprano and tenor lines rise in a manner redolent of incense. In particular, the light, buoyant bloom of Alice Halstead’s soprano is spellbinding and I would suggest that she is a voice to listen out for. Embedded in this programme are two very Anglican works: Bairstow’s Let all mortal flesh keep silence and Finzi’s magnificent Lo, the full, final sacrifice. They are majestically performed but make awkward bedfellows for their unaccompanied, Latin-texted colleagues. |
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