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Leighton & Martin: Masses for Double Choir
Mimi Doulton (soprano), Caitlin Goreing (alto), William Hester (tenor), Joseph Edwards (bass), James Orford (organ)
The Choir of King's College London, Joseph Fort
The choral forces of King’s College, London, are well focused, clean and expressive. Occasionally one or two of the solo voices show their youth, but the whole is delivered with such conviction,...
Leighton & Martin: Masses for Double Choir
Mimi Doulton (soprano), Caitlin Goreing (alto), William Hester (tenor), Joseph Edwards (bass), James Orford (organ)
The Choir of King's College London, Joseph Fort
Purchase product
The choral forces of King’s College, London, are well focused, clean and expressive. Occasionally one or two of the solo voices show their youth, but the whole is delivered with such conviction,...
About
In the 1920s Frank Martin, a Swiss Calvinist by upbringing, created a radiant Latin setting of the Mass for double choir, only to return it to the bottom drawer, considering it to be ‘a matter between God and myself’.
It was finally released for performance forty years later, around the same time that the Edinburgh-based composer Kenneth Leighton made his own double-choir setting – a work with moments of striking stillness, delightful to choral singers and yet rarely recorded.
Contrasts and comparisons abound at every point in this fascinating pairing of Masses from the supposedly godless twentieth century, and are brought out to the full by The Choir of King’s College London’s impassioned performances. A short organ postlude by the teenage Jehan Alain, written on retreat in a monastery in 1930, follows like a voluntary concluding the liturgy.
Contents and tracklist
- Mimi Doulton (soprano), Caitlin Goreing (alto), William Hester (tenor), Joseph Edwards (bass), James Orford (organ)
- The Choir of King's College London
- Joseph Fort
- Recorded: 18-20 April 2018
- Recording Venue: Church of St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood, London, UK
- The Choir of King's College London
- Joseph Fort
- Recorded: 18-20 April 2018
- Recording Venue: Church of St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood, London, UK
- James Orford (organ)
Awards and reviews
March 2019
The choral forces of King’s College, London, are well focused, clean and expressive. Occasionally one or two of the solo voices show their youth, but the whole is delivered with such conviction, even passion, that this matters not. By way of a concluding voluntary, James Orford plays Alain’s Postlude pour l’office de compline.
May 2019
Despite their outstanding performance of the Leighton, there is a real sense of involvement about the choir’s singing in the Martin which is in an altogether different league…Above all, this is a performance of astonishing intensity and musicality. A powerfully moving interpretation of a powerfully moving work.
June 2019
King’s College London Choir, unlike their namesake in Cambridge, is a mixed choir with women as sopranos and altos. They sing with great assurance and flexibility and the sopranos take no prisoners in their attack on their high lines … With the Finzi Singers’ version of the Leighton now available only as a download, this is the only current disc available of the Leighton … if you go for this coupling, you will not be disappointed.
