Bath Camerata – Songs of Renewal (2019) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

The promise of rebirth and rejuvenation is celebrated by SOMM Recordings’ Songs of Renewal, a collection of choral works – including two first recordings – by seven living British composers performed by Bath Camerata under musical director Benjamin Goodson. Joining the ensemble are soprano Elizabeth Cragg and composer-pianist Huw Watkins, whose Shakespeare setting The Phoenix and the Turtle (2014) moves puissantly from monotone chanting to solemn chorale for an allegorical poem mourning the passing of ideal love.

Commissioned by Bath Camerata to mark its 30th anniversary in 2017, the disc’s title track is a three-movement choral suite by Will Todd reflecting his interest in jazz music and featuring lyrics by the composer and former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.

The earliest work, Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year (2000), is a rich and varied tribute to the composer’s late mother cast in seven sections and setting an eclectic array of texts by William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Nashe and others. To words by E.E. Cummings, Judith Weir’s a blue true dream of a sky (2003) is, says English music specialist Jeremy Dibble in his booklet notes, “a revelation of the divine”. Cecilia McDowall’s Standing as I do before God is a moving centennial tribute to the British nurse Edith Cavell executed by the German army in 1915.

Two pieces by long-time SOMM collaborator, composer-baritone Roderick Williams, complete the disc. The setting of George Herbert’s Eucharistic poem Love bade me welcome (2007) is, in Jeremy Dibble’s words, “an harmonically sumptuous, largely homophonic narrative” that speaks of atonement and redemption.

Commissioned by Bath Camerata in 2018, Everyone Sang sets a familiar text by First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon in a poignant and powerful riposte to the futility of war that holds out the curative promise that “the singing will never be done”. Bath Camerata’s previous recordings for SOMM, with its founding director Nigel Perrin, include The Choral Music of Antonín Tučapský (SOMMCD 205) and the Gramophone Critics’ Choice To Music, a collection of German Romantic part-songs (SOMMCD 215) hailed as a recording of “uniform excellence… everything here is outstanding”.

Tracklist:
01. The Passing of the Year (Version for Double Chorus & Piano): I. Invocation
02. The Passing of the Year (Version for Double Chorus & Piano): II. The Narrow Bud Opens Her Beauties to the Sun
03. The Passing of the Year (Version for Double Chorus & Piano): III. Answer July
04. The Passing of the Year (Version for Double Chorus & Piano): IV. Hot Sun, Cool Fire
05. The Passing of the Year (Version for Double Chorus & Piano): V. Ah, Sun-Flower!
06. The Passing of the Year (Version for Double Chorus & Piano): VI. Adieu! Farewell Earth’s Bliss!
07. The Passing of the Year (Version for Double Chorus & Piano): VII. Ring Out, Wild Bells
08. a blue true dream of sky
09. Threshold of Night
10. Songs of Renewal: I. Me renovare
11. Songs of Renewal: II. Return Again
12. Songs of Renewal: III. Chorale
13. Standing as I Do Before God
14. The Phoenix and the Turtle
15. Love Bade Me Welcome
16. Everyone Sang