The 2009 Music Sales Choral Sampler is available from the end of August this year, online at our Choral genre web pages and as a CD. Containing a wealth of new repertoire for choirs of every kind, it is essential listening for anyone with an interest in choral music. Among the extracts are a range of new publications and new works by today’s leading composers as well as new collections of Christmas music, masterpieces from the Tudor period, the latest volume of the highly regarded New Novello Handel Edition and gems from the nineteenth century.
This year’s Christmas highlights include new carols by John McCabe, Richard Rodney Bennett and John Tavener, as well as two significant new anthologies. Noel 2 is a sequel to the popular Noel edited by Novello choral advisor David Hill and containing Christmas music from across the ages. Christmas at King’s is a musical companion to the world-famous Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, compiled by Stephen Cleobury. John Tavener’s Ex Maria Virgine is a sequence of ten short carols, both a cappella and with organ first performed and recorded by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, under Timothy Brown. The sheet music is published for the first time this autumn.
Tudor Anthems, compiled and edited by scholar Lionel Pike, contains a dazzling array of music from one of the most fertile periods of English music and works by the likes of Byrd, Dowland, Philips, Tomkins and Weelkes. Meanwhile, two new editions of Partsongs by R L Pearsall focus on the work of the nineteenth century composer who was so influenced by early music. In his anniversary year, Handel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day is the latest publication in the New Novello Handel Edition. Edited by Donald Burrows, this hour-long work is a setting of John Dryden in honour of music’s patron saint.
Choral societies seeking new repertoire will find interest in two new Requiems that have recently been added to the Music Sales catalogue. Swiss composer Carl Rütti has written an instantly appealing work that can be performed with organ alone, or with additional harp and strings. The Requiem by John Tavener draws on American Indian, Hindu and Sufi writings in addition to the traditional Latin text. Scored for solo cello, soprano and tenor soloists, choir and orchestra, a recording of the work’s premiere, which took place in Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral, has recently been released on EMI.
Other new works included in this year’s sampler are the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion by David Lang, The Human Heart, settings of William Blake by Giles Swayne, as well as pieces by Eric Whitacre, Tarik O'Regan, Nico Muhly and Pawel Lukaszewski.
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John McCabe is Composer in Residence at this year’s Three Choirs Festival in Hereford from August 8 to 15. The festival will see the premiere of two very different choral works, both festival commissions. The first, a new arrangement of Songs of the Garden, will be performed by the Festival Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra on August 13. McCabe has also written a new work for the young British early music vocal ensemble Stile Antico. Woefully Arrayed will be premiered on August 11 and is the composer’s response to the fourteenth century text famously set by William Cornysh.
The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, will perform the carol sequence Ex Maria Virgine at the Cambridge Summer Music Festival on August 2. The choir’s recording of the piece is now available on Naxos.
Please contact Sam Wilcock, Choral Promotion Manger for further details or for a free copy of the sampler CD
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