The Marian Collection by Delphian Records

The Marian collection

Choir of Merton College, oxford

Peter Phillips & Benjamin nicholas conductors

Charles Warren organ

Recorded on 2-4 July 2014 in the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: John Christ

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Cover image: Rose and lily curtain, c.1900 (silk, wool & cotton), Morris & Company / Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide / Gift of Jenny Legoe, 2003 / Bridgeman Images Session photography © Delphian Records Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk

With thanks to the Warden and Fellows of the House of Scholars of Merton College, Oxford

Judith Weir (b. 1954) Ave Regina caelorum [3:27]

2 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525–1594) Alma Redemptoris mater Francis Shepherd cantor [2:40] 3 John Tavener (1944–2013) Mother of God, here I stand from The Veil of the Temple [2:57] 4 Kerry Andrew (b. 1978) Salve Regina [7:00] 5 John Nesbett (fl. 1475–88) Magnificat Oliver Kelham cantor [9:24] 6 Hannah Kendall (b. 1984) Regina caeli [4:05]

William Byrd (1539/40–1623) Salve Regina [7:18]

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Ave Maria [1:50]

Dobrinka Tabakova (b. 1980) Alma Redemptoris mater [5:20] 10 Gabriel Jackson (b. 1962) I say that we are wound with mercy [7:24]

Robert Parsons (c.1535–1572)

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playing

Tracks 1, 4, 6 & 9 – collectively Four Marian Antiphons – are commissioned by Merton College, Oxford as part of the Merton Choirbook Track 14 is commissioned by Dr Simon Jones for the Dedication of the statue of Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom. Tracks 1, 4, 6, 9, 10 & 14 are premiere recordings

That the Choir of Merton College should record a disc of Marian music in the College’s 750th anniversary year could not be more appropriate. Dating back to the 1290s, the chapel in which they sing is under the dual patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist. In the top half of the great east window, early fourteenth-century stained glass depicts the Annunciation. The centrepiece of the lower half of the same window is a fifteenth-century image of a crowned Madonna holding the infant Christ. From roughly the same period, a stone statue of the Virgin stands outside the north transept, above the Merton Street door into the ante-chapel, the entrance used by parishioners when, until 1891, the building served as a parish church as well as College Chapel.

To this collection of Marian images has, this year, been added a statue of Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom (pictured opposite). The work of the renowned English sculptor Peter Eugene Ball, it has been given to the College by John Booth (Wyliot Fellow) and placed in the fourteenth-century south transept. Made from a South American hardwood and standing approximately four and a half feet high, the statue is partially covered in copper and embellished with solid silver and gold leaf. The Madonna, coloured in an ultramarine hue, and the Christ-child, which is of a russet brown, reflect some of the architectural features of the medieval piscina which frames the sculpture;

additionally, two large candlesticks stand either side of it inside the piscina, and echo the colour and decoration of the Madonna.

The statue was dedicated by the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner, on 24 June 2014, the feast of the Birth of St John the Baptist. Matthew Martin’s Salve sedes sapientiae, one of over fifty pieces now commissioned for the Merton Choirbook, received its first performance that evening.

The medieval title ‘Seat of Wisdom’ (sedes sapientiae ) draws on St Paul’s description (in the First Letter to the Corinthians) of Christ as the Wisdom of God. Christ’s hand reaches out to those who approach and invites them to ponder the mystery of the Word made flesh. Mary, supporting the child on her lap, encourages the worshipper to join her in prayer, that all who seek knowledge and understanding may find them in Christ, the Wisdom of God.

The Revd Dr Simon Jones Chaplain of Merton College

Peter Eugene Ball’s website is at www.petereball.com

Spanning seven centuries, several nations and multiple Christian denominations, the music recorded here is united nonetheless by a single figure: the Virgin Mary. She is celebrated in the traditional texts of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, from prayers and antiphons to hymns and responsories. But just as a gallery filled with Madonnas and Pietàs will reveal many different identities in this single figure, so each text and composer crafts a distinctive image of a character animated by contrasts – a woman who is at once virgin and mother, human and God-bearer, suppliant and Queen of Heaven.

At the core of this programme are the four Marian antiphons: ‘Alma Redemptoris mater’ , ‘Ave Regina caelorum’ , ‘ Regina caeli’ and ‘ Salve Regina’. Sung seasonally at the close of each day’s Compline service, together they offer a portrait that is both shifting and constant. They are presented here both in the sixteenth-century garb of Palestrina’s Alma Redemptoris mater and Byrd’s Salve Regina, and through four new settings from the Merton Choirbook, a collection of new work specially commissioned to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the College’s foundation. A set of Seven Advent Antiphons, commissioned and premiered in 2012 for the same project and recorded as the centrepiece of that year’s Delphian disc by the choir, featured composers ranging from the late Sir John Tavener to Gabriel Jackson, Rihards Dubra and

Ēriks Ešenvalds. The composers chosen to set these Four Marian Antiphons are all British, and all female – an appropriate choice for these works devoted to the Virgin.

Judith Weir’s Ave Regina caelorum is the sole representative here of this lovely text, generally sung between Candlemas and Easter.

The most joyous of the four Marian antiphons, it celebrates the Virgin in a variety of epithets.

Weir’s setting plunges listeners headlong into music that already seems mid-action, so urgent are its dancing triplet rhythms. There’s an innocent ebullience to this opening which, although it gives way briefly to more considered counterpoint (‘ Ex qua mundo’) and to a plainchant-inspired section for female voices (‘ Ave Regina’ ), cannot keep the smile from its face. Joy bursts out once again in the work’s final bar, and the dance continues.

Associated with Advent and Christmas, the Alma Redemptoris mater meditates on the Annunciation and Mary as mother. The intimacy and gentleness of this text finds sensitive echo in Palestrina’s early four-voice setting. There’s little contrapuntal activity to distract from the declamatory certainty of an opening that sees all voices unified in closely-spaced harmony and homophony embellished by only the most delicate of ornaments. Meditative rather than programmatic, only once does word-painting break into the abstraction, lending poignant

emphasis to a fallen people who ‘ strive to rise’ in a sudden, rhythmically anticipated leap upwards in all parts at ‘ Surgere’

In contrast to the simplicity of the Palestrina, Dobrinka Tabakova takes the antiphon’s original plainchant melody as just a starting point, framing it in a glowing triadic haze, sustained in pulsing, bell-like chords through the upper voices. At first the modal plainchant jars against these triads, establishing two rival harmonic worlds, but gradually the music evolves and a modified plainchant emerges that marries its original melodic architecture with a harmonic character in tune with its contemporary surroundings.

Traditionally sung between Pentecost and Advent, the Salve Regina is a plea for the intercession of Mary, Queen of Heaven: a prayer for the redemption of a fallen people. In Kerry Andrew’s setting it is a desperate plea indeed, one that sets the consonant certainty and beauty of the Virgin against the fragmented, chromatic confusion of her suppliants. It opens in a Babel of female voices: fragile, solitary cries that gradually gain collective force, brooding compulsively on their sins (‘misericordiae’).

The Virgin is hailed (‘Salve’) in an extended rocking passage, but the voices again become lost in tears and confusion, only finding resolution at the last moment, in contemplation of the sweetness (‘ dulcis’ ) of Mary.

Published in the Cantiones Sacrae of 1591, Byrd’s setting is given particular poignancy by its context. A risky and bold statement of Catholicism in a Protestant England, it harks back to an earlier, pre-Reformation age not only in its faith but also its musical style, which opens with the conventional semi-chorus of three voices, delaying the full five-voice texture until ‘Ad te clamamus’ for calculated, programmatic effect. Unaccountably neglected and only rarely recorded, this setting is as technically poised as it is expressive. Perhaps the contrapuntal density of the central section is offputting to contemporary ears, but it’s a complexity that speaks movingly of Byrd’s own theological conflicts, and one that is resolved with the sudden beauty and translucent textures of the imitative closing ‘ O dulcis’ entries.

Another text more concerned – like ‘Ave Regina caelorum’ – with rejoicing than with penitence is the Easter antiphon Regina caeli Hannah Kendall captures its single-minded, rapt quality in the textural unfolding of her seven-voice setting. Widely-spaced voices, often sitting high in their registers, give a sense of spaciousness, pealing with fragments of melody, each blending and losing itself in an echo chamber. Grace notes add a flicker of light and movement to sustained textures, bringing with them also just a hint of the musical colours of the Orthodox tradition that come into full focus elsewhere in John Tavener’s music.

Returning us to the origins of Mary’s significance, the Magnificat – a text drawn directly from the Gospel of St Luke – is the Virgin’s own song of rejoicing: a direct and personal statement of faith. In later Anglican usage it is usually paired with the ‘Nunc dimittis’, but the five-voice setting included here is by John Nesbett (or Nesbet), who worked in England a century before Byrd and is known to us today through just two surviving works; it is one of no fewer than twenty-four settings of this text preserved in the Eton Choirbook.

Nesbett employs the traditional alternatim structure, alternating verses of plainchant and polyphony (the latter employing both full and reduced choral forces). What is striking however is the work’s distinctive blend of late medieval characteristics – rhythmic complexity, extended melismas – with vocal range, harmonic movement and progression that anticipates the composers of the Renaissance. The verse sections are thrilling affairs, virtuoso passages that delight in syncopation and intricate rhythmic counterpoint: the trio for the three lower voices at ‘et sanctum nomen’ is perhaps the most elaborate example, though texturally the ‘Esurientes’ for bass and an unusually high treble gimel stands out. The neglect of this extraordinary work in the recording catalogue is astonishing.

The three settings of the so-called ‘Angelic Salutation’ included here each belong to a different age. Robert Parsons’ sixteenthcentury Ave Maria weaves a delicate, filmy veil of polyphony around the text in a setting that may have been intended for the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. The five vocal parts so typical of English music of this period are deployed carefully, building to a weighty climax in the closing ‘Amen’, set in relief by the delicacy of the preceding ‘benedictus fructus ventris’ section, which musically cradles the infant Jesus. Parsons’ treatment of dissonance here is particularly striking, delaying harmonic resolution with painful mastery, adding bolder shades to the motet’s largely pastel purity.

Reacting against the increasingly operatic drama of nineteenth-century church music, Bruckner’s setting of the same text harks back to the musical purity of an earlier age. There are echoes of both Palestrina and Bach in an elegant a cappella motet that grows from barest homophony in the upper voices to cascading waves of suspensions that peal through all seven parts. The work’s arching shape reaches its climax, significantly, at the third statement of the name ‘Jesus’, which sees male and female voices united for the first time in passionate supplication. Even here at his most restrained, the composer still finds quasi-symphonic scope within the confines of this musical miniature.

The moving underlying parts of Stravinsky’s Ave Maria, by contrast, turn the prayer almost into a cradle song. ‘I can endure unaccompanied singing in only the most harmonically primitive music,’ the composer wrote – a pronouncement amply borne out here. Any narrative quality in the text is negated by a meditative setting that restricts its harmonic language and range to the absolute minimum, creating a deliberately naïve piece of twentieth-century musical sophistication.

Setting words from Jesuit priest and poet

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe, Gabriel Jackson’s I say that we are wound with mercy takes its character from the verse’s own heady, dizzying word-painting. Hopkins delights in unexpected verbal collisions and neologisms – ‘She, wild web, wondrous robe’ – using these to startle new emotions from the reader. Establishing a high, ringing sonority in an opening for unison sopranos and organ, Jackson returns to it throughout, juxtaposing it with an earthier music for all voices that sits somewhere between hymn and plainchant – anchored harmonically, while the soprano music roams freely. From initial ecstasy and abstraction the anthem moves to more grounded certainties. The initial soprano unison is replaced by one shared through all four voices: lower, simpler, word made musical flesh.

Heavily marked by the faith and music of the Orthodox tradition (the composer converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977), the works of John Tavener pursue spiritual truth through simplicity and sonic drama. The Two Hymns to the Mother of God are typical of the composer’s middle period, deriving their structure and impact through repetition and gradual accretion of textures. ‘A Hymn to the Mother of God’ is built – like so many of Tavener’s works – around a structural trinity, framing inner stillness with a surrounding halo of resonance. The composer celebrates the Virgin’s elemental power in an exact canon between two choirs at the distance of just three beats. The effect of the close imitation is less an echo than a hazy amplifying of the original, like the glowing projected doubles of stainedglass figures on a stone church floor.

Where the sonic lines of the first Hymn are blurred, the ‘Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God’ is all clarity. A simple, arching chant melody is heard three times in different orchestrations. First we hear it over a sustained drone – secure, affirming – before it returns transformed by its own musical mirror-image, whose harmonies question and distort the certainty of the original. The final repetition however restores order, with thick, wideranging chordal accompaniment reinventing the melody as an ecstatic celestial hymn.

Taken from Tavener’s eight-hour, all-night vigil The Veil of the Temple, the short anthem Mother of God, here I stand is so audaciously, so exquisitely simple as to defeat musical analysis – its power is all in performance. Two strophic verses sustain a hushed meditation, direct and familiar as any folksong: a small, still point of contemplation within a musical epic.

Matthew Martin’s Salve sedes sapientiae is inspired by Mary’s devotional title as ‘Seat of Wisdom’. Using this epithet as a repeated refrain, the motet alternates this elusive, harmonically unstable music with chanted verses from the Book of Proverbs for a semichorus (initially alternating upper and lower voices). Proverbs’ personification of Wisdom as feminine opens up the possibility that

these verses are describing the Virgin herself, so that the effect is of two contrasting, but complementary, versions of the Virgin: one remote, sung in Latin, the other simpler, vernacular. In a fourth verse (now uniting upper and lower halves of the semi-chorus), St Paul’s declaration that Christ is the wisdom of God leads to resolution with the refrain; a final cadence affirms Mary as ‘mother of Christ’ and re-establishes her place as ‘seat of wisdom’.

Alexandra Coghlan is the classical critic for the New Statesman, and has written for The Times, The Independent, Prospect, Gramophone, and Opera magazine.

1 Ave Regina caelorum

Ave Regina caelorum, Ave Domina angelorum, Salve radix, salve porta, Ex qua mundo lux est orta.

Gaude, Virgo gloriosa, Super omnes speciosa, Vale, O valde decora!

Et pro nobis Christum exora.

Marian antiphon, Feast of the Presentation to Holy Week

2/9 Alma Redemptoris mater

Alma Redemptoris mater, quae pervia caeli porta manes, et stella maris, succurre cadenti, surgere qui curat, populo. Tu quae genuisti, natura mirante, tuum sanctum genitorem, virgo prius ac posterius, Gabrielis ab ore sumens illud Ave, peccatorum miserere.

Marian antiphon, First Sunday of Advent to Feast of the Presentation

Hail, Queen of heaven, Hail, Lady of the angels, Hail! O root, hail! O gate, From whom a light is shone on the world.

Rejoice, glorious Virgin, Lovely beyond all others, Farewell, most beautiful maiden! And pray to Christ for us.

Loving mother of the Redeemer, open gateway to heaven and star of the sea, help your fallen people who strive to rise again. You who bore, to the astonishment of nature, your own holy creator: Virgin first and last, who received that greeting from the mouth of Gabriel, have mercy on us sinners.

3 Mother of God, here I stand

Mother of God, here I stand now praying, Before this ikon of your radiant brightness, Not praying to be saved from a battlefield; Not giving thanks, nor seeking forgiveness for the sins of my soul, nor for all the souls Numb, joyless and desolate on earth; but for her alone, whom I wholly give you …

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841)

4/7 Salve Regina

Salve Regina, mater misericordiae vita dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.

Ad te clamamus exules filii Evae.

Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte.

Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exilium ostende. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis virgo Maria.

Marian antiphon, Trinity Sunday to First Sunday of Advent

Hail, Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope: hail.

To you we cry, exiled children of Eve.

To you we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

Turn, then, O our advocate, your merciful eyes toward us, and after this exile show us Jesus, blessed fruit of your womb.

O gentle, O loving, O sweet virgin Mary.

5 Magnificat

Magnificat anima mea Dominum. Et exultavit spiritus meus: in Deo salutari meo.

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae: ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est: et sanctum nomen eius.

Et misericordia eius a progenie in progenies timentibus eum.

Fecit potentiam in brachio suo: dispersit superbos mente cordis sui. Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.

Esurientes implevit bonis: et divites dimisit inanes.

Suscepit Israel puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae.

Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini eius in saecula.

Luke 1: 46-55

Gloria Patri et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto; Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper: et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded: the lowliness of his handmaiden. For behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath magnified me: and holy is his Name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him: throughout all generations.

He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away. He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel: as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed, for ever.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

8/11/15

6 Regina caeli

Regina caeli laetare, alleluia, quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia, resurrexit sicut dixit, alleluia. Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

Marian antiphon at Eastertide Ave Maria

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum: benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui [Jesus. Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae]. Amen.

Antiphon for the Blessed Virgin Mary (after Luke 1: 28 & 42, with added prayer)

(track 11 omits text in []s)

Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia, for he whom you deserved to bear in your womb, alleluia, has risen, as he said, alleluia. Pray for us to God, alleluia.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you: you are blessed among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb[, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death]. Amen.

10 I say that we are wound with mercy

I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air: the same Is Mary, more by name. She, wild web, wondrous robe, Mantles the guilty globe, Since God has let dispense Her prayers his providence: Nay, more than almoner, The sweet alms’ self is her And men are meant to share Her life as life does air.

If I have understood, She holds high motherhood Towards all our ghostly good And plays in grace her part About man’s beating heart, Laying, like air’s fine flood, The deathdance in his blood; Yet no part but what will Be Christ our Saviour still. Of her flesh he took flesh: He does take fresh and fresh, Though much the mystery how, Not flesh but spirit now And makes, O marvellous! New Nazareths in us, Where she shall yet conceive Him, morning, noon, and eve; New Bethlems, and he born There, evening, noon, and morn –

Bethlem or Nazareth, Men here may draw like breath More Christ and baffle death; Who, born so, comes to be New self and nobler me

In each one and each one More makes, when all is done, Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

Two Hymns to the Mother of God

12 A Hymn to the Mother of God

In you, O woman full of grace, the angelic choirs and the human race, all creation rejoices. O sanctified temple, mystical paradise, and glory of virgins. In you, O woman full of grace, all creation rejoices, all praise be to you.

Megalynarion (abbreviated), from the Liturgy of St Basil

13 Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God

O ye apostles, assembled here from the ends of the earth, bury my body in Gethsemane; and thou my Son and God, receive my spirit.

Exaposteilarion for the Dormition

14 Salve sedes sapientiae

Salve sedes sapientiae.

Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding.

Proverbs 3: 13

Salve sedes sapientiae.

She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her.

Proverbs 3: 15

Salve sedes sapientiae.

Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

Proverbs 3: 17

Salve sedes sapientiae.

Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

1 Corinthians 1: 24

Salve sedes sapientiae, Maria, mater Christi.

Hail, seat of wisdom.

Hail, seat of wisdom, Mary, mother of Christ.

The Choir of Merton College is one of Oxford’s leading mixed-voice choirs. It consists of thirty undergraduates and postgraduates, many of whom hold choral scholarships at Merton College. The main focus of the choir’s work is the singing of the services during term-time in the College’s thirteenth-century chapel. In addition to Choral Evensong, special services such as the Advent, Christmas and Epiphany Carol Services and the Requiem Mass for All Souls have a large following.

Outside term-time, the choir’s activities include tours – to France (2009, 2010 and 2011), the USA (2011 and 2014) and Sweden (2013) –and festival appearances such as Duruflé’s Requiem in the Cheltenham Music Festival, Tallis’s Spem in alium in the Beaujolais Festival, Mozart’s Requiem in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, Orff’s Carmina Burana in the St Jude’s Proms, the premiere of David Briggs’ Messe Solennelle in St Paul’s Cathedral and concerts at Cadogan Hall, London and St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh. The choir plays a leading role in the annual ‘Passiontide at Merton’ festival, including performances of Bach’s St John and St Matthew Passions, Handel’s Messiah and Arvo Pärt’s Passio. In the 2014 festival the choir gave the world premiere of Gabriel Jackson’s The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ in Oxford, and the US premiere at Trinity Church, Wall Street, New York.

In addition to these major premieres, in recent years Merton College Choir has given first performances of new choral works by Judith Weir, John Tavener, James MacMillan, Jonathan Dove, Ēriks Ešenvalds and Cecilia McDowall, and in November 2014 gives the premiere of Chorale Prelude by Sir Harrison Birtwistle. The choir spends 2014 in a ‘new music partnership’ with Choir & Organ magazine, and enjoys a relationship with Faber Music as Choir-in-Association.

The choir’s debut CD, In the Beginning (Delphian DCD34072), features music by Gombert, Weelkes, Holst, Copland and Gabriel Jackson and was named Editor’s Choice in the December 2011 edition of Gramophone magazine. Advent at Merton (DCD34122) was released in 2012 and spent six weeks in the Specialist Classical Chart; The Merton Collection (DCD34134) followed a year later, with a programme specially designed to mark the College’s 750th anniversary. The choir has broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and in February 2013 was filmed for the BBC series Music and the Monarchy

www.facebook.com/MertonCollegeChoir

@MertonCollChoir

The Choir of Merton College, Oxford

Benjamin Nicholas has held the full-time post of Reed Rubin Organist and Director of Music of Merton College, Oxford since September 2012. He has conducted the College Choir on tours to the USA and France, on BBC

Radio 3 and on recordings for Delphian. From 2000 until 2012 he directed the choir of men and boys at Tewkesbury Abbey, and was largely responsible for the founding of Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum when the Abbey School closed in 2006. He led that choir on thirteen overseas tours and in seven recordings on Delphian – including discs devoted to Weelkes, Mozart, Stanford and Rutter – and was Director of Choral Music at Dean Close School from 2005 until 2012. In 2011 he succeeded Andrew Carwood as Director of the Schola Cantorum at the Edington Festival of Music and in 2013 became Festival Director.

Benjamin Nicholas has conducted much of the large-scale choral repertoire including Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, Verdi’s Requiem and the Berlioz Te Deum. Recent concerts include Holst’s Sa¯vitri with Sarah Connolly and the Trondheim Soloists in the Cheltenham Music Festival, and Bach’s Mass in B minor in Cheltenham Town Hall. He has commissioned new work from numerous

composers including Bob Chilcott, Rihards Dubra, Howard Goodall, Grayston Ives, Gabriel Jackson, Howard Skempton and Philip Wilby.

Benjamin was a chorister in the Choir of Norwich Cathedral before holding organ scholarships at Lincoln College, Oxford and St Paul’s Cathedral. He made his solo debut on disc as an organist earlier this year with a recital disc on the newly-installed Dobson organ at Merton College (The Merton Organ, Delphian DCD34142).

Peter Phillips was educated at Winchester College and at St John’s College, Oxford, where he was Organ Scholar between 1972 and 1975 and read music under David Wulstan and Bernard Rose. In 1973 he founded the Tallis Scholars, with whom he has now appeared in over 1750 concerts and made over fifty discs, encouraging interest in polyphony all over the world.

He taught at the Royal College of Music until 1988, since when he has devoted himself to concert-giving and recording. In addition to the Tallis Scholars, he has worked with many other specialist ensembles; he currently appears regularly with the Chœur de Chambre de Namur, Intrada of Moscow, Musica Reservata of Barcelona and the Tudor Choir of Seattle.

He has made numerous television and radio appearances, on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service as well as on German, French, Canadian and North American radio, where he has enjoyed deploying his love of languages. Peter also works extensively with the BBC Singers.

As well as leading choral workshops annually in Venice, Barcelona, Rimini and Evora, Peter is Artistic Director of the Tallis Scholars Summer Schools – annual choral courses based in Uppingham (UK), Seattle (USA) and Sydney (Australia), dedicated to exploring the heritage of Renaissance choral music and developing an appropriate performance style. He has contributed a music column to the Spectator magazine for thirty years, and is the publisher of The Musical Times. In 2005 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, a decoration intended to honour individuals who have contributed to the understanding of French culture in the world.

Peter first worked in Merton College Chapel in 1974, since when, first with the Tallis Scholars and BBC Singers and now as a Reed Rubin Director of Music and Bodley Fellow in the College, he has returned to make many broadcasts and recordings.

Reed Rubin Organist & Director of Music

Benjamin Nicholas

Reed Rubin

Director of Music

Peter Phillips Organ Scholars

Peter Shepherd

Charles Warren

Sopranos

Jennifer Cearns

Polly Gamble +

Sarah Hewlett

Eleanor Hicks

Catriona Hull

Georgiana Jackson-Callum

Sophia Koepke

Helena Moore +

Annie Moxon

Lucy Pinching

Emily Tann

Eleanor Thompson

Helena Thomson

Altos

Kathryn Boast

Frances Buist

Jeremy Kenyon +

Elizabeth Leather +

James Potter

Carolin Rindfleisch

Lucy Valsamidis

Tenors

Timothy Coleman

Thomas Dyer + Oliver Kelham

Francis Shepherd + Domhnall Talbot

Basses

Nicholas Ashby

William Bennett

Jonathan Burr

Alistair Clark

Thomas Herring +

Alexander Ho

Stephen Hyde +

Robin Price

Benjamin Stewart

Jacob Swindells

+ semi-chorus in track 14

In the Beginning

Choir of Merton College, Oxford / Benjamin Nicholas & Peter Phillips

DCD34072

Established in 2008, Merton College’s new choral foundation is rapidly emerging as a major force in collegiate choral music. Its debut recording – bookended by Gabriel Jackson’s ravishing version of the rarely set Johannine Prologue and Copland’s glowing account of the first seven days of creation – makes inventive play with the theme of beginnings and endings, in a sequence of Renaissance and modern works that reflects the range and reach of the choir’s daily repertoire.

‘… will undoubtedly establish them as one of the UK’s finest choral ensembles. Listening to their superb performances and seamless blending of voices, it’s hard to believe that the choir is only four years old’ — Gramophone, December 2011, EDITOR’S CHOICE

Advent at Merton

Choir of Merton College, Oxford / Benjamin Nicholas & Peter Phillips

DCD34122

The beginning of Advent is celebrated with a particular solemnity at Merton. For its second recording, the choir explores the musical riches that adorn this most special time in the church’s year, centring on a newly commissioned sequence of Magnificat antiphons from seven leading composers including Howard Skempton, Eriks Ešenvalds and Sir John Tavener. The mingled hopes, fears and expectations of the season are beautifully articulated by this fervent body of young singers.

‘an immensely accomplished and responsive mixed-voice choir … Delphian’s recorded sound is beautiful’

— International Record Review, December 2012

The Merton Collection: Merton College at 750 Choir of Merton College, Oxford / Benjamin Nicholas & Peter Phillips DCD34134

In 2014, the University of Oxford’s Merton College celebrates its 750th year. Benjamin Nicholas and Peter Phillips’ specially conceived journey through seven centuries of choral repertoire provides a bird’s-eye view of some important moments in musical history, and features two composers personally associated with the College – John Dunstaple and Lennox Berkeley – as well as three new works commissioned for the anniversary celebrations. The choir, a relatively recent addition to this illustrious college’s complement of treasures, gives stylish and committed performances in the famous acoustic of Merton’s thirteenth-century chapel.

‘fine musicianship, commitment and versatility’

— Choir & Organ, January 2014

The Merton Organ: the new Dobson organ of Merton College, Oxford Benjamin Nicholas organ DCD34142

In a golden age of organ-building, Merton College’s new Dobson instrument stands out as exceptional. It is only the third American-built organ sent to the UK since the Second World War, a bold commissioning choice by Benjamin Nicholas, Reed Rubin Organist and Director of Music, and his colleagues in Merton’s recently established choral foundation. From the pre-pedalboard sophistication of native Stanley, to the mesmerising hues of Messiaen – and encompassing snapshots from the instrument’s vast literature in between – Nicholas combines flair and intelligence as he presents the stunning instrument he helped mastermind.

‘lithe, supple and pleasingly nuanced performances … Delphian’s characteristically clear, focused and framed recording’

— Choir & Organ, May 2014

The Marian Collection