MALCOLM WILLIAMSON (1931-2003)

Choral Music

Symphony for Voices: Invocation; Terra Australis; Jesus; Envoi; New Guinea

Love, the Sentinel

English Eccentrics Choral Suite: Goose-weather; An Amateur of Fashion; from “Sarah Whitehead”; The Quacks; A Traveller; The Old Beau

Requiem for a Tribe Brother: Requiem aeternam (Introit); Kyrie; Domine Jesu Christe (Offertory); Pie Jesu; Sanctus and Benedictus; Agnus Dei; Lux aeterna (Communion); Libera me; In Paradisum

Kathryn Cook (alto solo)

Joyful Company of Singers, Peter Broadbent

Australian composer Malcolm Williamson was the first non-Briton to be appointed Master of the Queen’s Music. His vast output covers almost every genre imaginable, including a large proportion of choral music.

This disc gives an excellent overview of Williamson’s choral writing, from the deeply spiritual Symphony for Voices to his Requiem for a Tribe Brother, written when Williamson learned of the death of a young Aboriginal friend. The work was premièred by the Joyful Company of Singers, featured on this disc, who also performed it with Peter Broadbent at Williamson’s own funeral in 2003.

One cannot help feeling that Malcolm Williamson's heyday was in the 1960s. Although his rate of composition remained high from being appointed Master of the Queen's Music in 1975 to the early 1990s, little from that period seems to have made much headway in the repertoire.

This disc of unaccompanied choral music concludes with one of those late works, however, the Requiem for a Tribe Brother, written in 1992 in memory of an Aboriginal friend.

It is a Requiem in the mould of the comforting line of Brahms and Fauré, rather than the apocalyptic visions of Berlioz or Verdi, but in its simplicity of style could have been written any time in the past 100 years.

More distinctive are the innovati ve Symphony for Voices, composed to poems by James McCauley in 1962, and a suite of choral portraits from his Edith Sitwell opera English Eccentrics of 1964.

The Joyful Company of Singers, who premièred the Requiem and indeed sang it at Williamson's own funeral in 2003, performs all this music with warmth and devotion, but special honours go to the contralto soloist, Kathryn Cook, in the challenging solo opening movement of the Symphony.

Matthew Rye, Telegraph

Naxos 8557783