The Choir of Tewkesbury Abbey School - Pater noster - Settings of the Lord's Prayer (2002)

This is a "survey" CD; it could also be subtitled "The Lord's Prayer through the ages" or "across the centuries." An inherent danger of this type of CD is the appearance of sameness resulting from the repetition of the same text in every track, but that has been largely avoided here because its organizational structure is not chronological. The monotony of the relative sameness to each other of contemporary settings has thus been sidestepped, too, while at the same time the echoes, inspirations, and similarities of the more recent, modern ones with the earlier versions have been highlighted in a kind of comparison-and-contrast progression. There is a certain sense of "the more things change, the more they remain the same" that comes out of the satisfying and also obvious variety that unfolds from this non-chronological arrangement.

The CD includes 21 different settings, opening with the original Plainsong melody, offering an anonymous medieval Mozarabic setting from the Iberian peninsula midway through, and concluding with Henryck Gorecki's "Amen" in the 22nd track - not a setting of the Biblical text, but simply offered as a fitting ending. The composers included (in rough chronological order, not that of the CD) are: Josquin Desprez, John Taverner(?), Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Jacob Handl, Robert Stone, John Sheppard, John Farmer, Otto Nicolai, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Charles Villiers Stanford, Igor Stravinsky, Frank Martin, Maurice Duruflé, Kenneth Leighton, Bernard Rose, John Stone, John Tavener, North Carolina's own Dan Locklair, John Caldwell, and Gabriel Jackson. Some of these composers are well known, while others are obscure; and some offer surprises: who knew that Nicolai (known mostly for his opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor ) and Stravinsky also wrote sacred music?

The text is sung in Latin, English, or French, according to that set by the composer in most cases, but the language of the title does not always indicate the language of the sung text, and two that were settings of Church Slavonic are sung in Latin and in English translation. Curiously, the setting by French Swiss composer Martin, excerpted from an oratorio in Latin, is sung in English translation; the logic behind this particular transposition escapes this writer. The Farmer uses an Elizabethan metrical rhymed version of the text, not supplied. The performances are lovely, the diction, precise, and the words, crystal clear. The volume levels are nicely controlled, and the sound quality is excellent, without any of the annoying echoing or reverberation that one might fear in a medieval abbey setting.