Recording of the Week, Festive Rutter from the Black Dyke Band and Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus

Having had to largely step back from my beloved brass band this year for health reasons, today’s Recording of the Week was an absolute tonic. Bradford’s Black Dyke Band join the Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus for a joyous album of (mostly) Christmas works by the wildly successful composer John Rutter – surely our most prolific living writer of Christmas carol settings.

Black Dyke, under their conductor Nicholas Childs, are one of the best brass bands in the world (in a rather Oxford/Cambridge, Rangers/Celtic way I mentally pair them with Yorkshire archrivals Grimethorpe Colliery Band). As with all British brass bands, the players are volunteers – though many have successful musical careers alongside playing with the band – so as well as being our most Northern Recording of the Week for a while, strictly speaking this album is also far more dominated by amateur musicians than most commercial classical releases. 

The ubiquity of carols played by brass instruments at this time of year testifies to the deep appeal this sound has for people – mellow, sensitive and comforting. It also allows the brass sound itself to become the centre of attention in a way that orchestral brass players rarely get to be. Not surprisingly the blend is immaculate, as is the characteristic brass-band vibrato, but one player really has to be singled out for particular praise, and that’s soprano cornet Connor Lennon. I know from first-hand experience how murderously difficult life can be as the piccolo of the band, and Lennon’s sound soars over the top of the band exactly as it should. Listen out for him particularly in the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol and Here We Come a-Wassailing.

Most of these arrangements (the majority of which come from the pen of Luc Vertommen, flying the flag for the extremely accomplished banding scene over in the Netherlands) are in fact for band alone, with the voices of the Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus under music director Darius Battiwalla joining just for the O Clap Your Hands that opens the album, the ever-popular Nativity Carol, and the Te Deum that forms its penultimate track – two anthems of more generalised, all-seasons praise bookending the band’s selection of sentimental carols.

The choir’s sound is ideal for this sort of music – big and not excessively polished. I don’t mean that to sound like faint praise or a criticism; the enthusiastic amateur ‘beautiful roar’ of the choral society is no less enjoyable than the purity of a one-to-a-part a cappella consort, and there’s such a thing as being too precise. Their sound is just what these big celebratory anthems need. I didn’t actually know O Clap Your Hands or the Te Deum – like many people, my familiarity with Rutter is heavily skewed towards Christmas carols – but both are lively and exciting, performed with real flair. The Te Deum is a tricky text to set well – a long hymn of praise that can easily drag in the wrong hands – but Rutter’s take is lively, varied and ends in a glorious blaze of light, capped off by celebratory bells and a sparkling top A from Connor Lennon.

For me, the standout tracks are the Star Carol (with some great moments for the euphoniums, in a sense the cellos of the band), the excited hurrying of Jesus Child (percussion to the fore here) and the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, which is the track I’ve found myself listening to the most on repeat. There’s just enough of an edge to the sforzandi from the lower end of the band to remind the listener that brass bands can blast out an overwhelming wall of sound when they want to – but again the delicacy and charm are the main draw. Flurries of nimble countermelodies from the euphoniums (certainly not present in the original version for choir and organ) are a nice little bit of ‘because we can’ showing off that I didn’t object to in the slightest.

I admit that I might be the exact target market for this, as a sometime band player and longstanding church musician, so perhaps I’m biased. But for my money, there is more Christmas spirit in this album than in any half-dozen solo recitals, or festive releases from cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges.