冬の聖務日課 クリスマスのための合唱作品集

セント・マーティン・ヴォイシズは、若いアーティスト、合唱指揮者の育成を目指し、アカデミー・オブ・セント・マーティン・イン・ザ・フィールズ、ロンドン・モーツァルト・プレイヤーズなどとの共演を行い好評を博しているロンドンの合唱団です。彼らは毎週木曜日の午後に「Great Sacred Music」と銘打ったコンサートを行うほか、英国をはじめアメリカや南アフリカへツアーを敢行するなど活動の幅も広げています。
このアルバムには、2013/14のシーズンにコンポーザー・イン・レジデンスを務めるルーシー・ウォーカーの「The Christmas Life」や、2022年に初演された人気作曲家のボブ・チルコットの「Mary, Mother」、歌手としてもおなじみのロデリック・ウィリアムズの「The Royal Carol」などの、クリスマスのために書かれた新しい作品が並びます。
ナクソス・ジャパン

A breviary is a book of prayers for the canonical hours. This one expands the term to cover the Christmas season, with new carols, not all of them religious, that reflect on scenes and themes of the most wonderful time of the year. All are quite recent, and theyre very well chosen by director Andrew Earis, with pieces that are compositionally and/or theologically innovative and are mostly by less-familiar composers. Consider Yshani Perinpanayagams When God Made Eve, with a text of her own that connects with the presence of the Creation story in Advent services and places Eve in a matriarchal lineage leading to Mary. It fits well with the major premiere that closes out the album, Bob Chilcotts Mary, Mother, termed a "carol suite" by annotator Sarah Maxted. Or hear the Reena Esmail work from which the album takes its title, ingeniously weaving Western melody with Indian ragas across its three movements. As distinguished as the music are the performances by the small St. Martins Voices group, unaccompanied or with organ or harp. The group marries precision to a strong and expressive sense of the text, and theyre backed up well by Resonus Classics (this is the choirs first album for the label), recording in the St.-Jude-on-the-Hill church in Londons Hampstead Garden suburb. This album reached classical best-seller charts in the late autumn of 2023, and one leaves it with the feeling that the grand tradition of English choral music has gone on renewing itself beautifully. ~ James Manheim