Christmas Lambswool? Shepherds' noels from the Marian Consort - recommended by KEITH BRAMICH '... a rather wonderful spin-off ...'

Since the human race tends to put its own causes before those of the creatures with which we share the planet, we shouldn't be suprised that this elegant disc of early Christmas music recorded in Oxford University's Merton College Chapel is called Christmas with the Shepherds and not Christmas with the Sheep. Rory McCleery and the members of his Marian Consort, described by The Sunday Times as 'bright young things from Oxford', will almost certainly have spotted (and possibly even have plotted) the rather obvious similarity between the name of the French Renaissance composer whose Christmas motet permeates the CD and a common name for the meat and fur produced from the biblical shepherds' charges.

Jean Mouton, born in the middle of the fifteenth century, and known for his refined motet writing, was also a singer, music copyist, ordained priest and teacher to the better known Adrian Willaert, founder of the Venetian School of composers. The motet in question, Quaeramus cum pastoribus verbum incarnatum ('Searching with the shepherds for the word incarnate'), is beautifully sung on the first track...

UNITED KINGDOM

EARLY MUSIC

CHORAL MUSIC