The Choir of King’s College London follow up on their first recording of Edward Nesbit’s sacred choral music, named a Gramaphone Editor’s Choice in 2022, with Nativity, a programme of Christmas music written by the composer over the last ten years: a joyful celebration that places Nesbit at the heart of the thriving British choral scene.

At the heart – but slightly to one side too. In a crowded field, Nesbit’s voice is distinctive. Expect much more fast-paced music than is the norm, an abundance of musical references to the classical canon, and frequent touches of humour. With their young, zestful performances, Nesbit’s music benefits from his close collaboration with the choir and its director Joseph fort.

Amidst the explosion of choral writing in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s contribution to the all-important genre of partsong has long remained underappreciated.

Now in her early thirties, Kerensa Briggs could hardly have enjoyed a more salubrious childhood for a composer of sacred choral music, surrounded by music in Gloucester Cathedral close, singing in choirs and hearing the daily choral services. Briggs went on to study music and sing as a choral scholar at King’s College London, and her music and her understanding of the way the voice works have their roots in this deep immersion.

This recording is the first dedicated to her music, in a portrait programme of premieres.

Joseph Fort and The Choir of King’s College London continue to attract widespread critical acclaim, both for the ambition of their recorded programmes and for their polished and mature execution.

Could the definitive recording of the best-loved of all Orthodox choral works come from an Anglican chapel choir? Delphian’s Paul Baxter thinks so.

The young King’s College London voices are bright, responsive and clear, and the recording is intentionally designed to bring out the bell-like phrases that ring through the whole piece. From the first second, the sound grabs you and holds you close: it’s punchy, and bold – a new presentation of music we all thought we knew.

In a recording to honour Rachmaninoff’s 150th anniversary, Joseph Fort and The Choir of King’s College London stake their claim to be among the finest choirs in the business.

As a young composer, Edward Nesbit was drawn to the rich complexities of contemporary instrumental music; little more than a decade later, he has found himself returning to the inheritance of his early youth as a chorister: the texts of mass, psalms and canticles, and the long centuries of the Anglican choral tradition. Not that there is anything traditional about Nesbit’s music, which synthesises these two heritages into a soundworld that is accessible, full of references yet always recognisably its own voice.

Joseph Fort – his colleague at King’s College London – with organist Joshua Simões and the Choir of King’s College London rise to the challenges expertly, while multi-award-winning soprano Ruby Hughes gives the lead in the clarion textures of Nesbit’s Mass.

Multi-award-winning Sean Shibe, widely recognised as the leading guitarist of his generation, joins Delphian regulars The Choir of King’s College London in these beguilingly conceived works by Shibe’s friend and compatriot Lliam Patterson, for the rare combination of choir with electric guitar.

Say it to the Still World casts Shibe as Orpheus with his lyre, in a work which draws fragments of text from poetry by Rilke to meditate on language, loss and the transcendent power of song. Elegy for Esmeralda is a rawer, angrier response to grief, while poppies spread – composed especially, like the other two works, for the performers who bring it to life here – is a further testament to art’s ability to reflect and transform the outer world.

Gustav Holst: The Cloud Messenger (Chamber Version)

Every December, over a thousand people attend the Advent Carol service in the Chapel of King’s College London, which is repeated over three nights to meet demand. This album offers a snapshot of one such service, with its characteristic mix of plainchant, seasonal hymns and polyphony old and new. The Great ‘O’ Antiphons (sung according to medieval Sarum practice) provide the backbone, pointing inexorably towards the Christmas birth. A brace of premiere recordings centres on composers with personal connections to King’s, and is complemented by current Professor of Composition George Benjamin’s rarely heard setting of a prophetic text after Isaiah. It intensifies the mood of heightened expectation proper to this very special season, and reminds us that something truly extraordinary is about to happen.

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‘Masses for Double Choir’ Recording: Kenneth Leighton & Frank Martin

In the 1920s Frank Martin, a Swiss Calvinist by upbringing, created a radiant Latin setting of the Mass for double choir, only to return it to the bottom drawer, considering it to be ‘a matter between God and myself’. It was finally released for performance forty years later, around the same time that the Edinburgh-based composer Kenneth Leighton made his own double-choir setting – a work with moments of striking stillness, delightful to choral singers and yet rarely recorded.

Contrasts and comparisons abound at every point in this fascinating pairing of Masses from the supposedly godless twentieth century, and are bought out to the full by The Choir of King’s College London’s impassioned performances. A short organ postlude by the teenage Jehan Alain, written on retreat in a monastery in 1930, follows like a voluntary concluding the liturgy.

The newest recording from the Choir of King’s College London (Joseph Fort, Director), titled ‘Masses for Double Choir’, also features James Orford (Organ), Mimi Doulton (Soprano), Caitlin Goreing (Alto), William Hester (Tenor) and Joseph Edwards (Bass).

The newest recording from the Choir of King’s College London (Joseph Fort, director), titled ‘An English Requiem’, revives the first English setting of Ein Deutsches Requiem by Johannes Brahms, as it would have been performed in nineteenth-century Britain.

Since its London premiere in 1871, Brahms’s Requiem has enjoyed immense popularity in Britain, in both its orchestral and chamber versions. But the setting we know today is not the one that nineteenth-century British audiences knew and loved. They would have been un

The choir which David Trendell directed for twenty-two years pays tribute in a collection of specially chosen pieces by David's colleagues, friends and former students, interspersed with the Renaissance polyphony which was Trendell's area of scholarly expertise.

His deep love for the Song of Songs has inspired many of the inclusions, and its nature imagery threads through the disc, adding a suggestion of renewal and rebirth to the memorial tone of works written in the difficult months after his untimely death.

The composers' affection for David and gratitude for his life and musical achievements is matched by the intelligence and deep musicality of the choir he raised to an international reputation, and which here takes on a sophisticated and challenging programme in his memory.

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Winner of the coveted Prix de Rome, Alfred Desenclos remains an almost unknown figure in twentieth-century music. His contribution to the distinguished French tradition of Requiem Mass settings dates from 1963; incorporating influences from Gregorian chant as well as rich harmonies based on added-note chords, this piece with its passionate outpourings is a revelation.

It forms the centrestone of David Trendell’s programme, which also features music by Villette – who shared Desenclos’ interest in jazz – and Poulenc, whose return to Catholicism in 1936 initiated a line of pieces, beginning with the Litanies a la Vierge noire de Rocamadour, that represent some of the most significant religious choral music of the twentieth century.

Trendell’s choir is on ravishing form, and the organ at his alma mater, Exeter College, Oxford, partners this music like a velvet glove.

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Strauss’s sumptuous Deutsche Motette is the last word in late Romantic choral opulence, its teeming polyphony brought to thrilling life by this virtuoso case of over sixty singers.

The rest of the programme explores the vivid colours and shadowy half-lights of a distinctly German music that reached its culmination in Strauss’s extravagant masterpiece. The singing throughout combines a musical intensity and imagination with an understanding of period style, that are hallmarks of both choirs’ work.

The Choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (directed by Geoffrey Weber) and The Choir of King’s College London (directed by David Trendell) are two of the UK’s leading collegiate and university choirs. Both choirs combine singing at services during term time with a busy schedule of concerts, recordings and broadcasts, both in the UK and abroad.

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Gregorio Allegri deserves better than for his reputation to rest on just one piece; alongside his iconic Miserere, which never fails to cast its spell on listeners, The Choir of King’s College London present premiere recordings of two of his five surviving Masses: Missa in Lectulo Meo and Missa Christus Resurgens.

Richly-wrought with consummate skill in the prima prattica of Palestrina, these glowing performances shed new light on a much loved composer. Born in 1582, Allegri an Italian priest, singer, and composer in the stile antico tradition spent much of his life working in Roman churches, joining the papal choir in 1629 and eventually becoming its Choirmaster. But it is for the Miserere that he is best known, a work so powerful that Mozart is thought to have written out the full score after hearing it only once, allowing him to circumnavigate the rule that prohibited anyone from removing any parts of the score from the Sistine Chapel, where it was guarded.

At the time of the recording, David Trendell (College Organist, Lecturer in Music and Director of the Chapel Choir at King’s from 1992-2014) was much in demand as a choral conductor. Now considered one of the finest mixed-voice university choirs in the country, performing music from the fourteenth century to the present day, the twenty-five choral scholars and two organ scholars bring great musical intensity to Allegri’s music in these luminous performances. Trendell’s scholarly acumen is also brought to bear with his own edition of Missa in Lectulo Meo performed here for the first time since the early seventeenth century.

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*** Nominated for the Gramaphone Early Music Award (2001)***

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