Phillip Cooke: Choral Music – Chapel Choir Of Selwyn College / Macdonald, Sarah

   in Choir & Organ (Jul, 2014)
Regent Records are to be congratulated for producing this first CD of choral (sacred and secular) music by Cumbrian-born composer Phillip Cooke (b. 1980). Over the last decade he has been steadily establishing himself [he was a Choir & Organ New Music composer in 2009], and his distinctive, very approachable compositional voice has won him many admirers. The recording includes his Morning and Evening Services as well as three fine motets (Verbum caro factum est of 2009 is especially effective), along- side secular part-songs and The Hazel Wood, a setting of Yeats. In his detailed liner notes Cooke cites the changing moods of his native Lake District and Howells as two …