Choir & Organ
‘Non-obvious classics’ might have been a more selling line, since even with the presence of Aaron Copland’s ‘Simple Gifts’ and Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’, this is hardly a routine pops set.
Opening with Randall Thompson’s elegantly simple and evanescent ‘Alleluia’ and closing with the Old-MacDonald simplicity of Copland’s ‘I Bought me a Cat’ the set organises itself with great naturalness around three further key pieces: Copland’s extended ‘In the Beginning’, Samuel Barber’s ‘Sure On this Shining Night’ and Charles Ives’s peerless version of Psalm 67, all of it sung with perfectly balanced reverence and delight by Alban Voices, to whom there is no cliché more applicable than ‘national treasures’.
A living tribute to conductor Robin White and his late wife Frieda; time the music-loving new king tapped him on the shoulder.
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