Music of the Spheres: Part Songs of the British Isles – Tenebrae

   in Choir & Organ (Jan, 2017)
This beautifully performed and recorded CD celebrates British composers’ responses to the part-song genre, with celebrated examples from Elgar, Bridge, Stanford (The Blue Bird)and Vaughan Williams (Three Shakespeare Songs), as well as less well-known examples from Jonathan Harvey, Judith Bingham and Bob Chilcott. Shakespeare is also a theme, and two of the most intriguing rarities are settings of ‘Come away, Death’ and ‘O Mistress mine’ by Herbert Murrill (1909–52). A largely forgotten figure from the middle years of the last century, Murrill composed a great deal of theatre incidental music and some film scores in the 1930s, when he served as head of music at the BBC. Tenebrae’s youthful sound is …