Judith Bingham reviews
Judith Bingham: Heaven and Earth, etc
Tom Winpenny (organ) (Naxos)
Rosa Mystica
Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir/Paul Spicer, et al (SOMM)
This Day – Celebrating a century of British women’s right to vote
Vanessa Bowers, Melissa Davies, Ellie Martin, Emily Wenman et al; Blossom Street/Hilary Campbell (Naxos)
Like to the Lark
Jennifer Pike (violin); Swedish Chamber Choir/Simon Phipps (Chandos)
Gaudent in Coelis: The Choirs of St Catharine's College, Cambridge sing works by Beamish, Bingham and Marsh
Many of the pieces here are CD premieres, and two were specially commissioned for the choirs of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge – the mixed-voice undergraduate and graduate choir, and the choir of local schoolgirls formed in 2008 by director of music Edward Wickham. Combined for this recording, they number 49 singers in total.
Judith Bingham Choral Music
Bingham: Jacob's Ladder
Chamber works by Judith Bingham
Resonus Classics launched itself a few months back with a world premiere recording rooted in 1825. Now, hot on the heels of the original version of the Mendelssohn Octet, comes an enterprising all-world-premieres release rather closer to our 21st-century home. Landscapes Real and Imagined maps the chamber music of Judith Bingham from the 1997 piano trio Chapman’s Pool, a seascape-cum-psychological journey, to three meditations for solo cello culled from the recent See and Keep Silent, eloquently played by Adrian Bradbury.
Bingham
Judith Bingham has choral music in her blood so it’s appropriate that this first disc devoted exclusively to her music should reflect a central strand in her creative make-up. Even the exception, The Snows Descend, is a carefully-wrought paraphrase for brass of an earlier choral work. The title track is the ‘botanical fantasia’ she wrote for the 2004 Proms, a meditation on Eden, its loss and the possibility of paradise regained; the writing is audibly ‘English’ in its debts to mystical Holst, Walton and Britten.
Vaughan Williams; Bingham
Vaughan Williams is said to have been pleased when a friend described him as ‘the Christian agnostic’. So it’s rather apt that his ambiguously mystical Mass in G minor should be paired with Judith Bingham’s Mass, which replaces the Credo – the central affirmation of Christian doctrine – with a dogma-free meditation on the presence of Christ in the breaking of bread. Apt, too, because, unlike many contemporary British composers, Bingham clearly isn’t ashamed to acknowledge her debt to Vaughan Williams.
Weir, Ads, Grier, Harbison, Macmillan, RŸtti, Bingham, Maxwell Davies, Goodall, etc
The range of styles here is wide: from Spike Jones/King’s Singers jollity in John Harle’s ‘Mrs Beeton’s Christmas Plum Pudding’ to austere meditation in Peter Maxwell Davies’s ‘One Star at Last’. So, if ‘Carols for a New Millennium’ is an indication of the way things are heading (a big if), what does this disc tell us about the music of the new age? The answer seems to be that it will be a lot like the music of the previous one, reflected in various kinds of distorting mirror – as for instance in Judith Weir’s ‘Illuminare Jerusalem’, with its wittily evasive harmonic twists and turns.
Mccartney, Rutter, Tavener, Bingham, D Matthews, R Panufnik, M Berkeley, Swayne, Bennett & Vaughan Williams
A Garland for Linda is a memorial for Linda McCartney, who died of cancer in April 1998. Seven pieces were written especially, with John Rutter and Giles Swayne submitting recent compositions and Vaughan Williams’s ‘Silence and Music’ added to preface the collection. The moods covered survey a range of possible reactions to death.
Byrd, Mendelssohn, Dearnley, Holst, Wesley, Bingham, Marenzio, Howells, etc
Epiphany (which is celebrated on 6 January) commemorates Christ’s manifestation to the wise men of the East. This fascinatingly diverse anthology from John Scott and St Paul’s Cathedral Choir highlights a rich source of inspiration provided for composers by the feast’s central theme – its progression of a journey towards a new life.