… The music is all for upper voices (giving a double meaning to the album’s subtitle), mostly with harp, the multi-faceted Louise Thomson. Corvus are a young choral ensemble under the leadership of Freddie Crowley. They are an innovative and top-drawer ensemble, presenting their second album on Chandos, after Revoiced, their excellent 2022 collaboration with the Ferio Saxophone Quartet.
Imogen Holst kicks things off, with her Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow (1950), a setting of a six-poem sequence by Keats, written for the Aldeburgh Festival. The short movements are neatly individuated, both in their varied vocal textures and the range of harp writing. Britten described them as “little treasures”, and I can only agree. There are three bursts of Gustav Holst, and the best is probably the Two Eastern Pictures, combining his distinctly English sound with some unusual and winning harmonic twists.
“Best known are the Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, in which the choir are spry in the first, elegantly long-breathed in the second and ghostly and distant in the third…”
The final item, Dirge and Hymneal, was new to me, dating from the time he was writing The Planets, referencing the chords of “Saturn”, then spinning off in a different direction. A nice find..
For the rest, there is an 11-song sequence An English Day-Book by Imogen Holst’s close contemporary Elizabeth Poston…. There are individual pieces by five living composers, Judith Weir, Hilary Campbell, Gemma McGregor, Olivia Sparkhall and Shruthi Rajasekar. The Weir, McGregor and Campbell pieces were all commissioned by Multitude of Voyces, a publishing charity that is doing great work promoting women composers… Olivia Sparkhall, an alumna of the Holsts’ school in London, and like them committed to musical pedagogy, is represented by the ecstatic Lux Aeterna, blurred chords emerging from the spatially separated choirs. Perhaps most arresting are Shruthi Rajasekar’s Ushās and Priestess, specially commissioned by Corvus, which show a modern ear approaching the same Hindu texts as Holst, a hundred years later.
“Here the Corvus Consort really glisten, the sound bright…”
