Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.

Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.

Click cover art to view larger version
Track(s) taken from CDA67909

Harvest

First line:
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
composer
2008; commissioned to celebrate Philip Brumelle's 40th year as choirmaster at Plymouth Congregational Church, Minneapolis, and first performed there in November 2008
author of text
after Hurrahing in Harvest

Wells Cathedral Choir, Matthew Owens (conductor), Jonathan Vaughn (organ)
Studio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available
CD-Quality:
Studio Master:
CD-Quality:
Studio Master:
Recording details: June 2012
Wells Cathedral, United Kingdom
Produced by Jeremy Summerly
Engineered by Julian Millard
Release date: August 2013
Total duration: 6 minutes 3 seconds

Cover artwork: Cornfield by Moonlight (1830). Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)
Private Collection / Bridgeman Images
 

Reviews

‘This excellent disc from Wells Cathedral Choir looks back over 15 years of Bingham's choral works … there's a frankness to the Wells choral sound that suits music that has nothing precious or twee about it. It creates an underlying muscularity, even in the glowing cluster-chords of Cantate Domino and foregrounds the texts that Bingham sets with Britten-like care … this collection is the most representative yet of the composer's functional, liturgical works’ (Gramophone)

‘The setting of Cantate Domino memorably commingles an anxious, questing quality with glimpses of certitude and placidity, a balance sensitively struck in this assured Wells Cathedral Choir performance … Our faith is a light is a luminescent setting highlighting the bright, gleaming quality of tone the Wells top line is currently producing. The Hyperion recording is atmospheric and expertly balanced. Recommended’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘Choral music is a sphere that welcomes the new. The Anglican (mainly) church is a leading source of new commissions for countless composers, among them Judith Bingham (b1952), who stands out not least because she spent her early career as a professional singer and knows the idiom. She favours rich, multilayered radiance, as heard in the two Wells service canticles—written for the excellent choir who perform here. Jonathan Vaughn provides spirited organ accompaniment and interludes. The lullaby setting of God be in my head, the abundant interpretation of Gerard Manley Hopkins's Harvest and the unexpectedness of the Bromley Missa brevis, written for an enlightened south London parish church, all play to Bingham's creative strengths’ (The Observer)
Harvest was commissioned to celebrate Philip Brunelle’s fortieth year as choirmaster and organist of Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Brunelle first introduced Bingham’s music to the United States in the 1980s, establishing a lasting friendship between composer, conductor and his various choirs. The essence of Harvest, first heard at Plymouth Congregational Church in November 2008, is distilled in its rapt setting of ‘These things, these things were here, and but the beholder / Wanting’: ‘Christ is there, if you just look’, suggests Bingham. The full title of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, Hurrahing in Harvest, and its teeming references to landscape and the natural world, celebrate the presence of Christ (‘physical and muscular’ in Bingham’s view) in all created things. Late summer’s heat and languor condition the style of the work’s opening, its sultry atmosphere gradually offset by music of great rhythmic vitality and transcended by choir and organ in their radiant apotheosis: ‘The heart rears wings’.

from notes by Andrew Stewart © 2013

Waiting for content to load...
Waiting for content to load...