David Willcocks was director of the King’s College Choir when stereo recording was in its Golden Age. American listeners first heard his recordings on Argo, then later on EMI, and all were amazed at the pure sound of this choir of men and boys. The latter came to epitomize the sound that boy sopranos should have, and many American choirs went to great lengths to emulate it. That lovely sound is up front in the shortest work on this CD, the unaccompanied Whitsunday Hymn, which is here issued for the first time. In the Oxford Elegy the choir is joined by speaker John Westbrook and the Jacques Orchestra in the composer’s setting of words from Matthew Arnold’s The Scholar Gipsy. The narrator delivers most of the text, on which the chorus comments.
In the sumptuous, sensuous Flos Campi, which draws quotations from The Song of Solomon, the chorus is treated almost instrumentally, balanced against the solo viola. The Sancta Civitas is a larger work, loosely termed an oratorio by the composer, and it employs sizable forces, including a semi-chorus and a distant chorus. As Vaughan Williams preferred, the latter is sung here by boys’ voices.
All of this music is lovingly performed by the English performers, with incredibly beautiful solo singing from Ian Partridge and John Shirley-Quirk in the Sancta Civitas, and honeyed tone from violist Cecil Aronowitz in Flos Campi. Producer Christopher Bishop lavished some of his best engineering on EMI’s English music recordings of the 1960s and ’70s; one wishes contemporary CD producers had gone the extra mile for EMI’s new ABT (Abbey Road Technology) processing. The CD is good, but it could be even better, a 9 that could have been a 10. [3/26/2000]
