Chandos's brave and important Parry series, conducted with sterling musicianship and remarkable insights by Matthias Bamert, adds another choral disc to the four out of the five symphonies so far issued. Recently The Soul's Ransom and The Lotos Eaters were released (1/92) and now comes the large-scale, nearly hour-long cantata Invocation to Music, a ten-movement setting of a poem by Parry's friend Robert Bridges and composed ''in honour of Henry Purcell'' for the bicentenary, in 1895, of his death. The first performance was at the Leeds Festival that year. How many have there been since then?

Neither Stefan Parkman nor Chandos could be accused of pandering to the masses in their choice of repertoire for this series of recordings by the Danish National Radio Choir. True, Reger's name may be more familiar than, say, Lidholm, Norgard, Pepping or Pizzetti (featured on previous discs), but only to the extent that the mere mention of Reger's a cappella music will send sensitive souls scurrying into the nearest Karaoke lounge. Visions of myriad notes covering the page would frighten most choirs away, but these singers are made of sterner stuff. For them complex contrapuntal structures, devious chromatic harmonies and textures so thick you need a forage knife to get through them, hold no terrors. Rather they not only weave their way through Reger's characteristically tangled scores without a moment's doubt, but illuminate the paths so clearly one hardly notices the dense musical undergrowth all around.

The extensive body of work by Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), which is often limited to his monumental nine symphonies (eleven if the two scores prior to the First are included), is characterised by the expression of his deep Catholic faith. Bruckner received his training as a young singer at the age of thirteen at the Abbey of Saint Florian, located a few kilometres from Linz in Austria. His faith is exalted in both his religious and orchestral works, as evidenced by his dedication of his Ninth Symphony to 'Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam'. It is not surprising that almost half of Anton Bruckner's catalogue, which consists of around 150 opuses in the Werke Anton Bruckner (WAB), are choral scores.

Alamire, under the direction of David Skinner, complete their survey of the choral works of William Byrd to mark the composer's 400th anniversary with this landmark recording of The Great Service and seven anthems. Emerging from centuries of obscurity, Byrd's Great Service, first revived in the early twentieth century, represents a pinnacle of English choral music. This recording commemorates the centenary of it's modern debut in 1924. With intricate polyphony and poignant text settings, Byrd's masterful use of ten voices reveals his unparalleled skill in capturing the essence of the Anglican liturgy. Complemented by seven anthems, thisalbum offers a comprehensive exploration of Byrd's rich, spiritual, and historical musical contributions.

Work on preparing this album began in 2019, when I first encountered Mykola Dyletsky’s music – we performed fragments of his Requiem Liturgy with Wrocław Baroque Ensemble in Kyiv. At that time, they made a great impression on me, which, along with my subsequent work as a conductor on this artist’s works and subsequent concerts, strengthened my feeling that I was dealing with a unique repertoire. Dyletsky’s work is a fascinating encounter between the East and the West – the language, liturgy and melody of the Eastern Church harmonise with Western compositional techniques and musical styles. There are clear inspirations from the Venetian polychoral style and stile concertato, and tutti sections are often intertwined with figurative fragments in a solo ensemble.

The challenges and rewards of performing early music are here vividly illustrated by The Binchois Consort, as creative scholarship comes to the aid of two substantial—but fragmentary—works by Jacob Obrecht, and an audacious recorded sound attempts to recreate the experience of the original performers 500 years ago: an album set to attract huge interest from critics and Renaissance scholars alike.

Einojuhani Rautavaara and Kalevi Aho, teacher and pupil, are both key figures in the Finnish music of their respective generations. Rautavaara’s musical language evolved from neoclassicism through dodecaphony and the stylistic freedom of the 1960s before he eventually allowed himself to choose his expressive idiom according to the individual requirements of his works. Towards the end of his career, his works took on a very consistent, softtoned character. For his part, Aho also began his career using a freely applied neoclassical style before gradually progressing to a more varied, at times modernist expressive and incisive approach.

The first recordings of choral masterpieces by Britten, performed by the dedicatees and newly reissued in a unique compilation.

While Fauré's Requiem is a monument of French sacred music, Gounod's Messe de Clovis is much less well known. It was composed from 1891 onwards as a tribute to Clovis who, like Joan of Arc, had become an iconic figure after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The two works share a reflective and intimate character that gives the impression of a return to the purity of Gregorian chant, although this does not detract from the jubilant character of Fauré's Requiem: "this warm, luxuriant sound leads to an elevation of the spirit", says Hervé Niquet. The work is recorded here in its 1893 version, in an orchestration that uses neither violins nor woodwind; a later version with full orchestra was published in July 1900. O salutaris by Louis Aubert (1877-1968) for soprano, violin, harp, organ and choir and L'Adagio for violin and organ by André Caplet (1878-1925) complete this programme, a co-production with the Palazzetto Bru Zane and performed with fervour by the Concert Spirituel.

True Concord’s newest album, A Dream So Bright, features two world premiere recordings of works by Jake Runestad. His EMMY®­-winning choral/orchestral work, Earth Symphony, with poetry of Todd Boss, was commissioned and premiered by True Concord in 2022. Dreams of the Fallen, Runestad’s prize­-winning work for solo piano, chorus & orchestra, features pianist Jeffrey Biegel and includes texts of the poet Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan war. Turner states: When the music lifts to its peak, when the choir sings into the high cathedral of the human experience—the hairs on the back of my neck take notice, my own heart takes notice, and I am moved once again by the fusion of sound and story. “Dreams of the Fallen” is a compassionate, emotionally­ layered, elegant, and poignant work of art that I am proud to be a part of.

Cornelis Schuyt is the greatest musician ever to come from Leiden and for much of his life was organist at St. Peter’s church there. He made an extensive trip to Italy and wrote text in Italian in his First Book of Madrigals, published in 1600. The second collection was published in 1611.

As a composer of sacred music, Bob Chilcott has found his own niche by writing accessible choral works that speak to contemporary sensibilities. As has been noted frequently, his Requiem evokes Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Duruflé, mostly through its gentle feeling and serene melodies, though without imitating their style or content. Rather, it has its own mix of somber harmonies and fluid, chantlike lines, and the expression of the work is a little cooler and darker. Chilcott's music admits occasional and mild dissonance, though the orientation is strongly modal and the harmonies always feel like a natural result of the counterpoint. Chilcott's Salisbury Motets, Downing Service, and three shorter pieces share the same modern Anglican style, which is approachable and easy to follow. The Wells Cathedral Choir, under the direction of Matthew Owens, sings with a pure tone and clear diction, and the sound of the recordings is quite resonant, thanks to the responsive acoustics of the Cathedral of St. Andrew.

When musicological research fails from the outset because it finds the deed but not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator, then we have to surrender completely to the listening experience and forget the unknowns. This is also the case with Missa solennis, which a certain Ioannes Cuisean composed for the people of Cologne as commissioned for the Feast of St. Gereon in 1663. Did the composer have something to do with the Strasbourg Cathedral because the only copy of the work survived there? No one knows. This has motivated the Cologne-based Josquin Capella, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2024, to make a grand event of this piece, which is as enigmatic as it is beautiful. Framed and interspersed with organ pieces by his – anything but unknown – contemporary Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667), a liturgy of magnificent sound is created with no need for further "research".

The three Italian choral works on this album cast new light on pre-existing musical material. Corrado Margutti’s Missa Lorca fuses the words of Federico Garcia Lorca with an evocation of Monteverdi’s polyphonic textures to create fascinating sounds, as the two movements from the Mass reveal. Pizzetti’s Messa di Requiem, the first of his great choral compositions, offers a wealth of expressive detail notably the use of Gregorian chant in music of huge range and richness. Lorenzo Donati’s Sicut Cervus fittingly concludes this selection as it threads music from Palestrina into his piece illuminating the past with vivid new colours.