Lament & Liberation
Works by Joanna Marsh, Roxanna Panufnik, James MacMillan, Dobrinka Tabakova et al
The Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge/Christopher Gray et al
Signum Classics SIGCD893 68:02 mins
Clip: Joanna Marsh – Echoes in Time i. The Hidden Light (Choir of St John's College, Cambridge)
Christopher Gray’s first album with St John’s College is an unflinchingly serious programme of contemporary music, ambitious and challenging for both singers and listeners alike.
James MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados (1989), is a furiously terse protest against political brutality, the outer sections based on the graphic poetry of the Argentinian-born writer Ariel Dorfman, while the central section is a lilting prayer-like setting of Ana Maria Mendoza’s poem Virgin of Guadalupe. The choir’s account of MacMillan’s sprawling, highly expressive score is full of urgency and drama, punctuated by outbursts of anger, plumbing the darkness of this brutal chapter in South America’s history.
Joanna Marsh’s Echoes in Time sets poetry by the Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, using Biblical stories to explore themes of displaced peoples and environmental destruction. This is Gray’s first commission for his choir, with Marsh providing a gentler, richly textured and more obviously spiritual counterfoil to MacMillan’s overtly political triptych.
Three shorter works, and a new apocalyptic commission for organ by Martin Baker, complete the programme. An excerpt from Roxanna Panufnik’s Westminster Mass (1997) spotlights a solo treble, while Helena Paish’s The Annunciation is full of intriguing chromatic harmonies. Dobrinka Tabakova’s moving setting of ‘Turn our captivity, O Lord’ provides a perfect coda to the themes of despair and hope explored with conviction in this impressive recording. Ashutosh Khandekar