This recording features a range of contemporary works by British composers and explores a variety of texts and spiritual dispositions across the full gamut of the church calendar and beyond. A number of the works, what is more, were specially commissioned for the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, and were conceived with the distinctive environment of its Victorian Chapel (designed by George Gilbert Scott and consecrated in May 1869), its organ and its fine, world-famous Choir which has done service since its post-Restoration establishment in the 1670s.

The earliest work performed here is James MacMillan’s triptych, Cantos sagrados, for choir and organ (a part characterised by its virtuoso nature) which dates from 1989. It was originally commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council for the Scottish Chamber Choir who premiered it at the church of Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh on 10 February 1990. A reflection of the composer’s political protest, the work was intended to be an expression of Liberation Theology and solidarity with the repressed poor of Latin America, a sentiment not immediately suggested by the work’s title ‘Sacred songs’. The first and third songs, Identity and Sun stone set words by the Argentinian-born academic, poet and playwright, Ariel Dorfman, whose writings focused particularly on the disappearances and murders of political prisoners. The rapid conversational, interrogative dialogue of Identity, punctuated by the chord clusters and precipitous angry passagework of the organ, embodies the horror of the discovery of the dead body found in the river, the shocking circumstances of which are thrown into relief by the tranquillity of the slow, chorale-like conclusion in Latin. The second song, Virgin of Guadalupe, uses a text by Ana Maria Mendoza, which is a prayer by the Indians of Tapeyepac, oppressed by their Spanish conquerors. It is combined with the Marian antiphon ‘Salve mater caeli porta’. Essentially a solemn motet which deploys a five-part a cappella choir as the main body of the structure, the organ enters to intensify the recapitulation of the opening material and, with its greater rhythmical activity, to heighten the effect of the jarring question (‘Why is it that in Spain, on the far side of our hills and valleys, across the sea, why is there another Virgin of Guadalupe?’). The triptych finishes with Sun stone, a chilling account of a political prisoner about to be shot by firing squad. Like the previous two songs, its desolate narrative intermingles with a Latin text, this time from the ‘Credo’ (‘Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto Ex Maria Virgine’), forming another chorale based on the preludial organ material.

Roxanna Panufnik’s Deus, Deus meus for eight-part choir and solo treble originally formed part of her Westminster Mass of 1997, composed specially for the birthday of Cardinal Basil Hume and the choir of Westminster Cathedral. The first eight verses of Psalm 63 tell of the thirst for God, and it is this sentiment of contemplation, established by the fertile melodic and harmonic play on the false relation (invoked by the solo treble), which infuses the motet’s bitter-sweet demeanour of yearning and desire.

Dobrinka Tabakova’s a cappella setting of verses from Psalm 126, Turn our captivity, O Lord, was composed in 2022 for Harry Christophers and the Choral Pilgrimage of The Sixteen in 2023. A setting of the last three verses of Psalm 126 (taken from The Primer, or Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1599) by the Anglo-Dutch antiquary and publisher, Richard Verstegen), the piece blends simple, slow-moving diatonic harmonies and modal progressions for altos, tenors and basses (which hover tantalisingly between C major and its relative, A minor) with an embellished, more rhythmically florid upper line, itself a recreation of the Jewish cantor’s prayerful expressive lament pervaded by the prospect of hope in the Lord for joy and liberation from exile (‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy’).

The textual source for Helena Paish’s The Annunciation, commissioned by St John’s in 2024, and first sung in the Chapel on 31 May, was the eponymous poem (from his last publication of poetry, One Foot in Eden, in 1956) by the Orkney-born poet and translator, Edwin Muir. A manifestation of Muir’s almost Damascene Christian conversion in 1939, the poem, couched in the poet’s typically direct and uncomplicated language, affecting images and skilful rhyming scheme, ruminates on the mystery of the interface between the heavenly Angel Gabriel and the worldly, humble ‘girl’ of the virgin. This is conveyed in Muir’s opening line (‘The angel and the girl are met’) and further encapsulated in the richer harmonic textures of the coda where, with more quizzical effect, the same words are epigrammatically reiterated. At the end of the opening section, with its distinctive Lydian inflections and major-minor fluctuations, a climax represents the first high point of rapture (‘Heaven in hers and Earth in his’) before, as a fresh evocation of wonder and awe, the tonality (retaining its Lydian colour) shifts more radically to A flat minor and then, en passant, to the major as a part of richer sonority of soprano and alto soloists and (up to) 17 choral parts. A transformed restatement of the opening material (‘Outside the window footsteps fall’), in which the dominant of C, more nebulous at the beginning, is now more fully verified by a full cadence in that key (‘Rolls its numbered octaves out’). This ‘white-note’ purity subsequently becomes significant in the coda as the juxtaposition of C major and the flat submediant (A flat) prove to be more vividly symbolic of the angel, the virgin and the extraordinary aftermath of their encounter.

Joanna Marsh’s triptych, Echoes in time, for double choir was commissioned by St John’s in 2023 as the first commission under its new musical director, Christopher Gray. The triptych was also expressly composed as a foil to the triptych by MacMillan on this recording. For the second and third movements, Marsh drew on the words of poet, academic and Anglican priest, Malcolm Guite, with the College commissioning a new poem from Guite for the first movement. Influenced by earlier formal paradigms of poetry, especially those of John Donne and his seventeenth-century metaphysical contemporaries, The hidden light explores the Petrarchian sonnet. Composed for the 2023 Advent Carol Service at St John’s and sung there for the first time on 3 December, it dwells on the intimate fears and potential dangers of the travel-weary Mary, mysteriously expectant, as she and her husband search for shelter. The initial idea (E-G sharp-G natural) based around E, the prevailing key of the larger structure, seeks to evoke a sense of foreboding with the onsetting darkness (‘it’s getting darker’) and this idea is developed throughout, as is a secondary image of weariness in the falling phrase first heard in the tenor. Much effect is gained in depicting the trudging imagery of the tiring, seemingly endless journey to Bethlehem from the mantra-like repetitions of these cells through antiphonal exchange between the two choirs and their attendant, rich textural sonorities and shifting harmonies, yet all gravitates towards E major at the conclusion as ‘love casts out fear’. Refugee was first sung at the Epiphany Carol Service at St John’s in 2024. Another sonnet form, though this time of the English kind with its final rhyming couplet, this musical essay also focuses on a similar theme of travel and fatigue, but now in the context of the flight of Mary, Joseph and Jesus to Egypt to escape the murderous Herod. Essentially through-composed, Refugee also makes use of repeated cells though this time made up of a series of harmonic progressions which are organically reworked as a dialogue between the choirs. A central paragraph becomes more rhythmically animated as a depiction of Herod’s wrath, but, in the transformed restatement of the opening material, charged with a greater passion, we are reminded of the mortality of tyrants (‘But every Herod dies’) and their ultimate judgment before God. The last piece of the triptych, Still to dust (another English sonnet), was composed for Lent and first sung at St John’s on 9 March 2024. In keeping with the penitential tone of the season, Guite invokes the image of ashes, taken from the emblematic burning of a cross for the Ash Wednesday service, and parallels the action with the environmental ‘violence’ of forest burning and the destruction of trees. Germane to the tripartite structure is a figure built on a series of descending melodic fifth intervals (‘Receive this cross of ash upon your brow’) first heard in the alto solo which runs like a cantus firmus throughout the eight-part texture complemented by an assembly of other short contrapuntal lines in the rest of the choir. A more agitated central episode (‘But all the trees of God’) provides an emotional accumulation to the climactic cri de coeur (‘He weeps to see the ancient places burn’) before a recurrence of the fifths motive provides an appropriate adjunct to a reprise of the Lenten symbology of the ashes (‘Hope could rise from ashes even now’).

Former Director of Music at Westminster Cathedral, Martin Baker is a composer and recital organist with a special reputation for improvisation (he was first-prize winner in the Improvisation Competition at the St Albans International Organ Festival in 1997). His organ prelude, Ecce ego Ioannes Omnium Sanctorum (‘Behold, I am John of all the Saints’), was written specifically for this recording and makes reference to John’s vision of the world’s annihilation with the opening of the seventh seal (Chapters 8 and 9 of the Book of Revelation). The prelude as a whole is dominated by a rising fanfare idea. This is developed in a series of three major recurrences, interspersed by quieter, more angular episodes, which grow in cumulative force as the vision becomes evermore chaotic and terrifying with the appearance, at the end, of the ‘two hundred thousand thousand horsemen’ with their breastplates ‘of fire, and of jacinth and brimstone.’ The prelude concludes with violent trills and the inclusion of a third hand to utilise the renowned and unique ‘Trompeta Real’ of the St John’s Mander organ (which Michael Tippett so vitally exploited in his St John’s Service in 1962) as a final gesture of menace and destruction.

Jeremy Dibble © 2025

In this first album at St John’s, I wanted to lean into the College’s well-established tradition of championing new music. At the heart of the programme are two triptychs: James MacMillan’s Cantos sagrados, composed 35 years ago, and Joanna Marsh’s Echoes in time, commissioned by the College in recent months. There is also a new choral work by Helena Paish and a new organ work by Martin Baker alongside existing works by Roxanna Panufnik and Dobrinka Tabakova.

The album can, of course, be dipped into, but I hope that it will particularly reward those who choose to listen to it in its entirety. It opens with a single treble voice calling into the darkness. As Deus, Deus meus unfolds, Panufnik uses an expansive palette of harmony to capture the plaintive longing of a soul in pain reaching out to God for rescue: ‘My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water’. Into that darkness comes The hidden light, Joanna Marsh’s first setting of Malcolm Guite’s poetry, premiered at our 2023 Advent Carol Service. In Refugee, commissioned for our Epiphany Carol Service two months later, the horror of the Slaughter of the Innocents is confronted, but there is justice: ‘every Herod dies, and comes alone to stand before the Lamb upon the throne’. In the final movement, commissioned for our Lent Meditation service, the burning of Palm Sunday crosses for symbolic use on Ash Wednesday reminds us of the burning of the forests. We make late repentance for the loss, ‘but hope could rise from ashes, even now’.

The next piece gives us a glimpse of how that hope might be fulfilled. In Edwin Muir’s poem, The Annunciation, heaven touches earth as the Angel appears to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Paish captures both the personal simplicity of the meeting and also its cosmic significance with shimmering textures of up to seventeen parts. The idea of Mary as the connection point between things earthly and things celestial also underlies MacMillan’s Virgin of Guadalupe where she is addressed as the ‘caeli porta’ (‘portal of heaven’).

Martin Baker wrote his organ work Ecce ego Ioannes specially for this album. The title takes us into the book of Revelation, and St John’s vision of the world’s destruction, prefiguring the terror of the MacMillan work to come. The St John’s organ’s famous Trompeta Real stop shines through the texture in the last line, reminding us that the Revelation reading is set for All Saints’ Day, when the church remembers all the saints who have passed into heaven.

I got to know James MacMillan’s Cantos sagrados while still at school and it left a deep impression on me. There was an unsettling immediacy about both the music and poetry that was heightened by the juxtaposition of the English and Latin texts. This comes over most searingly in Sun stone, when the prisoner is shot and the word ‘crucifixus’ is there in the background, reminding us of the death of another innocent man, nearly two millennia before. Jesus empathising with us in our suffering is the powerful conclusion of the journey begun with the Annunciation.

I am aware that this is not an album for the faint-hearted. Having confronted some challenging issues head-on, I wanted to finish by offering comfort, and that comes in the form of Tabakova’s Turn our captivity, O Lord. Through soaring ornamented melodies in the treble line and rich, luminous harmonies in the lower voices, Tabakova leaves us with the reassurance that ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy’.

Christopher Gray © 2025