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.
It opens with Holst’s popular The Evening Watch, a setting of Henry Vaughan. While The Morning Watch from the metaphysical poet’s same collection hails the new day and its ‘symphony of nature’, The Evening Watch is a darker meditation—in the form of a dialogue between the Body (tenor and mezzo-soprano solo) and Soul (choir)—on the Body’s final hours. Holst, who conducted the work’s premiere at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in 1925, responded with dense but radiant harmonies that convey the mystery of ‘the last gasp of time’.
The theme of mystery and afterlife continues in Cecilia McDowall’s Standing as I do before God, but the soul here is of a given person: Edith Cavell, the nurse executed by a German firing squad after helping Allied servicemen to escape into neutral territories. Couched in a choral haze, the solo soprano—angelic, even disembodied—sings Cavell’s own words, while the choir largely sings poet Seán Street’s reflection on her final steps from the prison cell to face her brutal end. In the hushed final lines, the solo soprano is echoed by fellow sopranos before the whole texture recedes poignantly into nothing.
The eternity in Francis Pott’s The souls of the righteous comes from the Book of Wisdom. The text describes how, ‘in the sight of the unwise’ (i.e. those left behind), the death of others stands for misery and destruction. We are reminded that ‘they are in peace’. Though the sound-world is richly 20th-century, the clarity of the part-writing references William Byrd, whose setting of the same text (Justorum animae) had long been admired by Pott. The solo tenor joins in only after the choir has sung the three verses of the text, rising to a more impassioned mood. The closing ‘Amen’ is mellifluous and gloriously extended.
American composer Caroline Shaw (born 1982) won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013, becoming the youngest composer to do so. And the swallow is a setting of verses from Psalm 84, expressing a yearning to be close to God. There’s a dreamlike surging, churning quality thanks to the close repetition of short figures. The second verse speaks of a sparrow and a swallow finding a home, which put the composer in mind of the Syrian refugee crisis and the search for a home where a family can grow.
Next comes another memorial to a real-life figure. Composer and jazz pianist Richard Rodney Bennett wrote A Good-Night for a tribute album, A Garland for Linda, in honour of Linda McCartney (the wife of Paul McCartney) who died of breast cancer in 1998. Bennett had met Linda (who established her meat-free food business in 1991) through Paul and the two would swap vegetarian recipes. Bennett said he wanted the piece to be ‘a gentle goodbye to a remarkable woman’. He set a text by Francis Quarles (1592-1644), keeping a foot in the English part-song tradition. The hushed repeat of the last line, ‘No sleep so sweet [as thine], no rest so sure’ is especially affecting.
A Garland for Linda was first performed in 2000 at Charterhouse School, from where, 110 years earlier, Vaughan Williams had graduated. Only a dozen years after leaving the school, in 1902, came Rest. It is one of the 10 settings of Christina Rossetti he made over that year and the next, including the famous ‘Silent Noon’. (Four years later, Gustav Holst would set Rossetti’s ‘In the bleak midwinter’.) Rest clearly identifies with the English part-song tradition, though in its harmony it is not readily recognisable as Vaughan Williams. The composer underlines ‘Paradise’ with a bright D major chord but saves the most gentle beauty for the penultimate line, ‘Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be’.
A prayer for deliverance received its UK premiere in Tenebrae’s tour of this programme in 2023. Atlanta-based composer Joel Thompson made this setting of Psalm 13 in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic and was moved by the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery and the death at the hands of the police of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. It’s a bold, ambitious piece whose performing challenges are well suited to the virtuosity of Tenebrae’s singers: including writing in up to 16 parts and a soaring high B for solo soprano.
One of John Tavener’s most popular choral pieces, along with the William Blake settings The Lamb and The Tyger, Song for Athene gained a huge worldwide audience when it was heard at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. It was written four years earlier, after Tavener had attended the funeral of Athene Hariades, the daughter of a family friend, whose ‘beauty, both outward and inner,’ the composer said, ‘was reflected in her love of acting, poetry and music’. The text was compiled by his collaborator and spiritual adviser Mother Thekla from the Eastern Orthodox Service and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Over a perpetual bass drone, six appearances of ‘Alleluia’ receive choral responses before a final Alleluia. The sixth Alleluia prompts a dazzling climax on the words ‘Come, enjoy rewards and crowns I have prepared for you’, marked in the score to be sung ‘With resplendent joy in the Resurrection’.
Robert Lucas Pearsall is perhaps best known for his setting of ‘In dulci jubilo’, a Christmas favourite, but Lay a garland is nevertheless among his most popular pieces. The text (adapted into the third person) is Aspatia’s song from the play The Maid’s Tragedy (published in 1619) by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. In the play, Aspatia meets her death by the sword of her betrothed, Amintor, who has been ordered to marry another. ‘Upon my body lie lightly, gently earth,’ she beseeches in her song. The music is dripping with glorious chains of suspensions that swell in tension before relaxing into resolution.
Arthur Sullivan was much less prolific than Pearsall in the part-song department, contributing fewer than 20 (as against Pearsall’s 70). The long day closes is a gentle, Victorian setting, reflecting the muted autumnal imagery of the poem, by Sullivan’s friend H. F. Chorley, who had written the libretto for Sullivan’s now-lost first opera The Sapphire Necklace.
Until relatively recently it was believed that Howells wrote his unaccompanied Requiem following the death of his 9-year-old son Michael in 1935. In fact it was written three years earlier, though elements of it found their way into the Hymnus paradisi, which memorialised his son. Curiously, Howells only set one text from the Requiem Mass—the ‘Requiem aeternam’—and set it twice over the Requiem’s six movements. In addition to two Psalm settings (23 and 121), there are the framing movements, whose texts are drawn respectively from the Burial Service according to the 1928 proposed Book of Common Prayer and from Revelation. Howells’s biographer Paul Spicer describes the Requiem as having ‘that heady mixture of Palestrina’s purity of expression coupled to a subterranean white-hot lava’.
William Henry Harris was organist at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, for more than 30 years from 1933, during which time he tutored the then Princess Elizabeth (Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II) and her sister Margaret. Like Harris’s popular Faire is the heaven, Bring Us, O Lord God also presents a vision of the beyond, this time to a text by John Donne. Alastair Sampson, a chorister at St George’s from 1953 to 1958, has recalled how, in the first read-through, Harris (affectionately known as ‘Doc H.’) slowed down ahead of the harmonic sleight of hand at the very close—more a rug-pulling from under the feet—in order to gauge the effect. ‘A stifled gasp went round the room,’ Sampson said, ‘and he knew full well that he had achieved his purpose.’
The daughter of a Methodist minister, Joanna Marsh was Organ Scholar at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and has been based in Dubai for the past 15 years or so. Her piece In winter’s house, for lower voices, is widely performed and was commissioned by Tenebrae in 2019. Evening prayer was inspired by Josef Rheinberger’s motet Abendlied (‘Evening Song’) and its text, from the book of prayers and devotions by Lancelot Andrewes, the Bishop of Winchester (first published in Latin, in 1675), offers thanks for this day but also beseeches God not to abandon us as we ourselves reach the twilight years in life. Marsh adopts a luminous, six-part texture recalling Rheinberger’s piece, making the pleas with increasing urgency before turning to a more restful mood for the final lines, beginning ‘Abide with me’.
Edward Bhesania © 2025
To complement this astonishing piece, I have chosen a collection of other works; some are well known, and some may be less familiar to listeners. All of them explore similar themes of deliverance, forgiveness, comfort, and solace in times of particular stress and sorrow. Herbert Howells’ Requiem has always deeply moved performers and listeners alike, and provided the centrepiece of the second half of our concert. Alongside this, works by living composers Joanna Marsh, Cecilia McDowall, Francis Pott and Caroline Shaw help create an intensely poignant atmosphere in the wonderful Ampleforth Abbey. These beautiful settings of devotional texts are all distinctly individual and utter gems in the programme.
I hope you enjoy listening to this concert, and can imagine yourself sitting with us at golden hour, surrounded by this stunning music, as the sun’s last rays shine through the Abbey’s windows over the choir.
Nigel Short © 2025
