<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    TEWKESBURY VARIATIONS

To hear the boys at their best alone, try the opening of James Macillan's A New Song [listen, REGCD177 track 5, 0:02-1:32], eerily sustained in flurrying organ and decorated in a manner descended from Gaelic (as opposed to Tavener's Orthodox) chant, is quite magical. The men (their low drone more consciously Tavener-like) achieve a similar eerie magic. Toby Marshall, the generally clear-voiced, just slightly short-breathed soloist in Mendelssohn's Hear my Prayer [listen -- REGCD177 track 6, 1:56-3:11], leads capably despite the odd shy moment, and has maturer enunciation than many an adult singer; what a pleasure to find Mendelssohn's Lord, how long wilt Thou forget me? (Psalm 13) -- the text also famously set by Purcell -- with Timothy Robinson the reserved yet appealing young soloist.

Howells's Collegium Regale Te Deum is capably sustained, and never overburdened, with subtly managed dynamics and a fine sensitivity also to the three lower voices' singing in a work that so easily tempts overkill. Byrd's Sing Joyfully inclines (as often : it's inherent in the music) to slight sharpness, and the boys just overstate -- till the fine parting shot -- their role in Stanford's The Blue bird, one of the subtlest partsongs in all music, which should have an almost Yeatsian sense of ornithological mystery (the poem is actually by Stanford's younger contemporary Mary Coleridge, 1861-1907). But their Brahms Requiem ('How lovely') would grace any concert hall; and the same boys' 'Pie Jesu' brings to the Fauré the same continental tang, and a tangible feel of Chartres or Saint-Denis. They're not perfect; but my goodness they're musical. A fine vintage.

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