There is some very beautiful singing on this CD, undoubtedly inspired by Thomas Tomkins’ magnificent–and woefully underrecorded–church music, but also due to the skill and experience of the performers. British choral music fans will notice some familiar and distinguished names among the Oxford Camerata singers, including Carys-Anne Lane and Rebecca Outram, and the phenomenal young countertenor Robin Blaze. The program, which mixes in a few examples of Tomkins’ masterful writing for organ, includes performances of “When David heard that Absalom was slain” and the Funeral Sentences that are among the very best on disc. In these pieces, the singing is as sensuous, sensitive, and as well-tuned as can be imagined. This is some of the most intense and moving music in the entire choral repertoire, and it really makes itself felt when it’s sung like this. The thick-textured anthem that concludes the disc, “O sing unto the Lord a new song”, is slightly betrayed by sound that loses clarity in the more dense, loud passages. But this, and the too-abrupt beginning of the first track, are my only quibbles about a recording that should please any lover of 17th-century English choral music.
