ROAD TO PARADISE

 

Gabrieli Consort & Players, Paul McCreesh 

 

Thomas Tallis (circa 1505 - circa 1585)

Miserere nostri   

Clangat pastor in tuba - Responsory & Prose for the feast of St. Thomas à Becket 

 

Robert Parsons (circa 1530 - circa 1570)

Ave maria - motet, 5vv 

 

Benjamin Britten (1913 - 1976)

A Hymn to the Virgin (1930, rev. 1934) 

 

William Byrd (circa 1543 - 1623)

Christe, qui lux es 

 

John Sheppard (circa 1515 - 1515)

Media vita 

 

Richard Rodney Bennett (1936 - )

A Good-Night 

 

John Tavener (1944 - )

Song for Athene   

 

John Sheppard (circa 1515 - 1515)

In pace in idipsum 

 

Gustav Holst (1874 - 1934)

Nunc Dimittis   

 

William Henry Harris (1883 - 1973)

Bring us, O Lord God 

 

Herbert Howells (1892 - 1983)

Take him, earth for cherishing (1963) (motet on the death of President Kennedy)

English text: Helen Waddell 

 

Gregorian Chant

In paradisum

 

McCreesh turns an artistic thread binding the two golden ages of English choral music – Tudor and 20th-century – into a pilgrimage of the soul, from life to death to immortality in paradise, in this essentially “commercial” programme. It ranges from Tallis’s Miserere nostri, via 13th-century plainchant, to Herbert Howells’s commission commemorating the assassinated American president John F Kennedy, Take him, Earth, for Cherishing – written in 1963, but filled with grief for his own son, who had died, aged nine, almost 30 years earlier. Richard Rodney Bennett’s tribute to Linda McCartney, A Good-Night (1998), and John Tavener’s Song for Athene (sung at Diana, Princess of Wales’s funeral service in 1997) are less interesting, musically, than Howells’s masterpiece. However, Robert Parsons’s Ave Maria, William Byrd’s Christe, qui lux es and especially John Sheppard’s enormous, almost 20-minute Media Vita make ample amends, as do the 16-year-old Britten’s prodigious A Hymn to the Virgin and Holst’s beautiful Nunc Dimittis. There are riches here, superbly sung by the Gabrielis, and the spiritual “packaging” should help the disc to fly out of the shops.

Times

  

DG 4776605