Yesterday the Choir was up early for a trip to BBC Television Centre in London, for we would be performing live on The Andrew Marr Show on BBC1. Choristers and choral scholars gave a performance of John Rutter's The Lord bless you and keep you following brief interviews with director Edward Higginbottom and one of the choristers. Later on in the day it was announced that our new album Illumina: Music of Light had debuted at #6 in the UK classical charts - so a good day all round! Below are some photos from our studio visit.

Where did it all start?  Well before Luther pinched 'Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen' (a secular love song) for a German chorale, which subsequently became the linchpin for the St Matthew Passion.  Gounod certainly added to the tradition by adapting Bach's keyboard prelude in C, and making of it an Ave Maria.  And Barber confidently added religious words to his Adagio for Strings.  What about Mahler and his Adagietto?  Perhaps the first thing to say is that the original Adagietto has not somehow been smothered by making of it a choral arrangement.  It is still there.  The next thing to say is that when composers launch their works on the world, they begin to say goodbye to them.  And 75 years after their death they can exercise no further control.  Their music then enters the 'public domain'.   So we are certainly allowed to view them in new ways.  And this we have done in singing Mahler's Fifth Symphony Adagietto to the text 'Ave Maria'.  Mahler would have been surprised, I've no doubt.  But as a composer who adopted the hymn Veni creator spiritus in his Eighth Symphony, he was not unfamiliar with Christian texts, and their meanings.  The question is does such a setting undermine the effect of Mahler's music?  Or does it add a possible new layer of identity on the movement?  For you the listener to decide.  What we can be sure of is that a very present and familiar musical figure of our own time, Barrington Pheloung, has been very happy to have his music transformed, here as a setting of the Gaelic Blessing (in Latin of course to reflect Inspector Morse's leaning towards the classics!).  Enjoy!  If you like that sort of thing of course...

* One music critic felt ill when listening to the Mahler arrangement.  Our audiences have however uniformly liked it.  De gustibus non est disputandum.

Following BBC Radio 3's selection of our most recent release 'Exultent Superi' as their 'CD of the Week' in November 2011, New College soloists have received another outstanding review for this collection of François Couperin motets – some of which are recorded for the first time. An extract from the five star review, which appears in the March edition of BBC Music Magazine is included below:

'The performance is astonishing. Two New College trebles, aged 11 and 13, sing with a musical maturity and technical focus which I have never heard bettered. Intonation is spot on, with none of that instability (for some winsome, for others unnerving) which often characterises unbroken boys' voices. In the duet 'Lauda Sion Salvatorem' their individually distinctive voices are beautifully matched. No less exceptional is the haute-contre (light high tenor) of Guy Cutting[...] With excellent strings and sympathetic recording this is a real revelation.'   
 ***** Performance; **** Recording 
George Pratt, BBC Music Magazine

The album can be viewed here. 

Update 24/02/12: Exultent Superi wins more critical acclaim from MusicWeb International, who have named the release their 'Recording of the Month'. They say:

'The crystal clear and superbly balanced sound quality is as pleasing as I have heard in a church acoustic. It would be hard to imagine a more gratifying recording of these scores. In all respects this Novum release is quite stunning!'
Read the review here.

_ This week the BBC features our new Francois Couperin recording as 'CD of the week'.  This is welcome recognition of the delight the recording will give to many who had never thought of themselves as afficionados of French baroque music.  Couperin's style is extremely accessible, and genial.  It will make excellent Christmas listening when you have tired of carols.  The CD also contains works never before recorded, and which are now performable through the reconstructions made by Edward Higginbottom, an expert in the field of French baroque music.  There are additional pluses to this release: the focus in the digipack on illustrations of College art treasures, and the musical focus on the young soloists of the choir, who sing this music with no less precision and style than seasoned professionals. 

St Cecilia’s Day: 22 November. We celebrate it by singing Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia at evensong (Benjamin Britten himself was born on 22 November). New College Chapel has a permanent reminder of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music. If you walk towards the altar, halfway along on the south side, and on the lower set of lights, you will see a woman playing a lute – not of course the organ with which the saint is ordinarily associated. The colours of the window (by William Price) are a combination of reds, blues and greens with the lute showing a rich brown. Here St Cecilia takes her stand with many other of the great figures of the Church’s history, the patriachs and prophets, the St Catharines and Lucys.  

But the chapel iconography does not stop here. On the great east-wall reredos, St Cecilia stands there in stone, on the third gallery of statues, over to the left. She holds a portative organ, as almost invariably shown in early Renaissance pictorial representations.  ‘Sound the organ’ – Resonent organa – is the first line of the splendid motet to St Cecilia by Francois Couperin, newly reconstructed and now available on a remarkable New College CD of music by this the greatest of early 18th-century French composers. The CD case and booklet carry a number of images of New College, including both the representations of St Cecilia described above, Price’s window neatly contemporaneous with the music. These images bring Couperin’s works into relationship with the place that has now championed some of his best but also some of his least-known music. For the discerning, this CD will be a revelation, and a great gift. The Novum label continues its tradition of featuring the artworks of New College, as well as presenting the music of its world-class choir. Go to the Shop to order your copy now!

This latest release from Novum is a CD of motets by François Couperin (1668-1733), the greatest figure in the French musical scene of the early 18th century. Everybody knows his fabulous harpsichord pieces, few his equally fabulous motets. Why? Many of them were effectively lost for over 200 years, and some have survived only in incomplete form. As a result, the motets are a sorely neglected part of his output. This New College release puts that right. Something like half the CD is of music never before recorded. The incomplete sources – violin parts lost soon after composition – have been reconstituted here by Edward Higginbottom, musicologist as well as Director of New College Choir.

The CD features solo voices from New College Choir, including two exceptional trebles and a real haute-contre, together with an instrumental ensemble of distinguished baroque players. The whole ensemble is directed from the keyboard by Edward Higginbottom.

In this week's New CD Show on Classic FM, presenter David Mellor has chosen our latest release on the Novum label - Mozart's Requiem - as his 'Connoisseur's Choice'. He notes that the album appears on our new own-label, as well as featuring all male soloists taken from the Choir, including treble soloist Jonty Ward, who appeared in this year's Proms.  

You can listen to the album's appearance on Classic FM's listen again player from about 42 minutes in. The Requiem disc is available in our online shop.

Back in May we announced the first ever occasion that all the New College Choir discs were available to view in the same place - on our Facebook page. This was the first step in the process of making our entire discography available to view.

We sell a lot of our discs through our shop, but these only represent around half of what we've recorded; up until now there has been no public catalogue of all 110+ New College discs.

From today this comprehensive list is now live on our website. You can sort by composer, name or release date, or you can view all the album artwork in high resolution on the album covers page. You can still view high resolution scans of album backs (including LPs) but these remain exclusive to our Facebook page.

Just as important is the history of recording at New College and a page dedicated to our own label Novum; neither of these is entirely new, but both have been updated, given more prominence and separated from the shop.

We hope this long-overdue section will be of interest and a useful reference point - do let us know what you think in the comments!

In this month's Gramophone Podcast, Martin Cullingford talks to director Edward Higginbottom about our new label Novum! It includes a short extract from our new disc, Mozart's Requiem, and you can skip straight to the interview with Professor Higginbottom by going to 15:45 in the player window.

You can listen to it here: http://gramophone.co.uk/classical-music-news/download-the-latest-gramophone-podcast-1

This release was officially launched today and to mark the occasion was played on BBC's 'In Tune' this evening. It is available to buy from our shop - and you can read a special blog post about different versions of the Mozart Requiem here.

"Another Mozart Requiem?  Surely not!"  A somewhat negative view, and not one anybody interested in New College Choir would have, I'm sure.  If we followed its implication ("we have enough versions already"), then there would be no further recordings of any Beethoven symphonies, or piano sonatas, or Wagner operas, or Rachmaninov piano concertos, etc, etc.  The rising generation of musicians would be told: "Thank you very much, but we are not really interested in what you have to say about these works: we prefer to live with the performances we know – we like living in the past."  That's not what New College intends to do!  All the same, there has to be something new and distinctive about a recording of a warhorse.  And there certainly is with the New College version of the Mozart Requiem.  Let's start with the fact that it is sung by a choir of boys and men; let's go on to say that the solos are sung by voices from this choir, and that the ages of these singers range from 12 to 22.  Not possible you say.  Buy it and see whether it's possible!  You will be impressed by a level of accomplishment wholly matching a team of seasoned professionals.  But what you also get is a coherence of sound and approach between choir and soloists rarely heard in such performances.  And this would have been a circumstance well-known to Mozart, who only months before his death had been offered the post of Kappellmeister at St Stephen's Cathedral Vienna.  When you add to the above the contribution of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, there is a very special conjunction of talent and style.  So, that's why it's been worth recording Mozart's Requiem another time.  And this version is worth catching up with.


Available here: http://www.newcollegechoir.com/mozart-requiem-recordings.html

Edward Higginbottom