Customer Reviews

Sermons and Devotions

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The King's Singers showcase their incredibly broad talent. But if you thought "Good Vibrations" was their best CD, beware; this is for head-banger King's Singers fans only. This will not be popular among pop music lovers---only artiste-types.

Another excellent recording from the versatile and virtuosic King's Singers. The theme of this CD is 20th century sacred music. The performances, as usual, are superb. The choice of pieces is very interesting. Some of these pieces were commissioned by the King's Singers themselves. This CD doesn't have the broad appeal of the King's more popular works or probably even of their fine recordings of early music but is very enjoyable.

I have heard a good many snippets of this unusual CD. One thing is clear- the King's Singers are not to sneered at: the range they cover given their limited size is almost frightening, particularly given the justice they can do to such weighty material as recorded here.

I am very familiar with the Tavener and Stravinsky on this disc, and it is a constant amazement that with just two counter-tenors against four lower voices, the group managed to achieve a mostly successful balance in them- especially in Tavener's "Funeral Ikos" to which they bring a remarkable shine. It is a pity they tackled the Gorecki "Totus Tuus"; they really could have done with augmentation (just as the Tallis Scholars were augmented to cover the forty parts needed in their recording of Tallis' motet "Spem in alium") and the work does lose something in being scaled down to six parts. That said, the group still manages to capture an intensity in the piece that listeners familiar with it will recognise. Meanwhile, the other works on this disc were written for the group, and in that respect they are easier to listen to. I have performed some Richard Rodney Bennett music in my time and find it to be on the approachable end of the modern music spectrum. He is a thoughtful composer and uses his forces well, as this recording shows.

Not the best showcase of the more familiar works perhaps, but undoubtedly a triumph for the King's Singers.

The King's Singers are well-known for the breadth of their repertoire - anything from pop classics to traditional Western folk songs to Renaissance madrigals. The album "Sermons and Devotions" demonstrates that they are willing to try on music that can be demanding for themselves as well as more challenging (well, somewhat) to listeners.

On the CD, they cover Stravinsky's "Pater noster" and "Ave Maria". Though I still prefer the latter as done by a mixed ensemble, they certainly do them both justice.

The album opens with Gorecki's "Totus tuus," perhaps a surprising choice for a small ensemble, because of the big sound the work demands.

The works which most caught my attention were the "Wymondham Chants" and the title work, "Sermons and Devotions". The former, by Geoffrey Poole, makes bold use of non-traditional vocal techniques, but conveys a very striking atmosphere: as the liner notes mention, it brings forth images of processions of monks, and of the abbey which inspired the composition.

"Sermons and Devotions" uses as its text the prose of John Donne, including the famous line, "Ask not for whom the bell doth toll; it tolls for thee..." Bennett's setting of these sermon texts heightens, in my opinion, the sense of the words' philosophical and religious weight. The final section of the work has the singers creating bell tolling effects by accenting and then holding certain pitches, making them sound like echoes.

Finally, very little can match the serene beauty of Taverner's "Funeral Ikos", based on the Greek Orthodox funeral service for a priest.

Overall, this cd might seem somewhat somber compared to others released by the King's Singers, e.g. their folk songs and madrigal albums. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the excellence of the music, all written in the twentieth century, and also by the vigor the group displays in the recording of it. (Two of the works on the cd were commissioned by the King's Singers).

A fine recital of contemporary a capella choral music, recorded by the King's Singers in 1995 (Sermons & Devotions and reissued on Catalyst in 2004, Sermons and Devotions, which is the version I have. Since the reviews of the latter are automatically posted also on the entry of the former, I don't know which you are reading). Three of the six compositions featured on the CD were written for the ensemble: the pieces of Tormis, Poole and Rodney Bennett. Stravinsky's Pater Noster and Ave Maria are the "20th Century Classics" in the lot, and not the composer's most significant compositions: they are written in a very simple, hymn-like, neo-medieval style, with none of the angularity and rhythmic verve so typical of the composer. As they are, they sit well with the compositions of Gorecki and Pärt, both - contrary to Stravinsky - VERY typical of their composer's style: tonal, hymn-like, lush but simple. Obviously there is a public for that, I'm not part of it. Sure, it is pretty, but it sounds to me much like a pastiche. I expect of contemporary music to be more challenging. For that kind of music, I prefer to go back to the composers of the era of Henry VIII, those compiled in the Eton Choirbook of which Harry Christophers and the Sixteen have done such a marvelous selection: their music is on an easily more sublime plane than the derivations of the neo-simplistics of today (see my review of The Eton Choirbook Collection [Box Set] and the links to the individual releases). Tormis' "The Bishop and the Pagan" is more interesting than that: it starts by pitting an imitation of a medieval hymn and what starts as an almost jazz-like dum-dum bass and moves back and forth to a more thorny conflict of both, depicting the fight between the 12th Century Christian missionary Bishop Henry and the heathen Finnish peasant farmer Lalli. Last page of the story: Lalli slays Henry and Finland is saved for another number of years.

But the two compositions that make this disc attractive are, in my opinion, those of Geoffrey Poole and Richard Rodney Bennett. Not that they are, opposed to the former's "easy-listening" and "un-challenging", "difficult-listening" and "challenging". They are more in the wake of Britten and Tippett, but they strike a fine balance in their use of the advances of 20th-Century music, vocal techniques and expression. Poole's "Wymondham Chants" were composed in 1970 and are the composer's reaction to the ruins of the medieval Wymondham's Abbey in Norfolk. They purport to be "the process of reconstructing the ideal musical structures that would once have belonged to his chosen medieval texts", but while there are some references to medieval music, the music is harmonically and melodically decidedly 20th century, which makes its hymn-like passages infinitely more fascinating (to me) than those of Pärt and Gorecki. And the study on onomatopoeia that opens the second song, "Scherzo: Tutivillus" is evocative of the vocal experiments of Berio or Ligeti. The liner notes don't tell us when Rodney Bennett's "Sermons and Devotions" were composed, mentioning only that it was on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the King's Singers. OK, a check on the publisher Novello's website enabled me to establish that this was in 1992. They are written on texts of John Donne and, like Poole's composition, strike a fine balance with the hymn-like and the contemporary, with always an harmonic ambiguity even in the hymn-like passages that makes it always ear-catching and attention-arousing.

TT 69:13, adequate liner notes but (at least in the Catalyst reissue) texts of songs not provided.