Trsors du Paradis is a celebration of the human spirit against adversity, and is a fitting conclusion to 2022. The project is the brainchild of Director Matthew Foster.
This Double CD represents more than just hard work and an outstanding achievement from a choir that only sings once a week during university term times. In the space of just one academic year, twenty-four hours of rehearsal time in total, the chapel choir of Lincoln College managed to learn and perform two CDs worth of some of the most monumental and challenging works in the church choral repertoire.
This CD was also a celebration, and a call for the future of church music. Many musical establishments, beyond just those based in liturgy, were decimated at the hands of the pandemic. Lincoln's choir, despite having eight choral scholars and two organ scholars had more or less fizzled into nonexistence in just two years! We needed something tangible and challenging to get the choir together and working towards something and the repertoire chosen reflects this endeavour.
We included Durufle's requiem, performed just as the last of restrictions began to fizzle out, celebrating the beginning of a new era, and the demise of such a difficult time in so many people's lives. We included Yves Castagnet's Messe Salve Regina, a behemoth of a work, including two organs. This piece is only possible because we could finally get everyone together, assemble the entire forces of the choir, and in our eyes represents the power of unity, and the beauty in the simply, being based entirely on the simple SalveRegina plainchant. Finally, we performed a world's first recording a piece by Jonathan Dove, Treasures in Heaven, and accompanied this with two other similar works of his, all with a moto perpetuo musical style. We feel this represents the perpetual motion of the world, despite its hardships, despite everything trying to keep us still, we persevered, we kept going, and in the end, we came out okay on the other side.
