Chandos Records CHSA 5350

‘Welcome Joy’ sees Corvus Consort’s upper voices team up with harpist Louise Thomson, under the direction of Freddie Crowley, to present utterly glorious music for upper voices and harp in celebration of visionary women’s voices, both vocal and compositional.
The music of Imogen Holst provides the recording’s cornerstone. Her setting of pastoral poetry by John Keats, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow (1951), opens the disc, alongside music by her father Gustav Holst, himself a champion of women’s voices and musical education for women.
The Indian-American composer Shruthi Rajasekar was invited to compose a response to the Third Group of Gustav Holst’s Choral Hymns. These pieces, Ushās and Priestess not only add exciting new repertoire for these unusual forces, but explore directly Holst’s engagement with ancient Hindu texts.
Elizabeth Poston’s An English Day-Book (1967) is a wonderful cycle charting the course of a day in the English countryside, packed with strikingly vivid musical depictions of bells, clocks, songbirds, owls and a mischievous bumblebee.
The album is completed with a set of sublime works by living female composers Judith Weir, Hilary Campbell, Gemma McGregor and Olivia Sparkhall.