Choir Of St. John's College, Cambridge - Jonathan Harvey: Deo (2016)

An online listing stating only "Deo. Harvey. Nethsingha." might not give the potential listener much to go on. What you have here is a collection of settings of standard sacred texts by composer Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012), with the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge (men and boys, as young as ten), conducted by Andrew Nethsingha. The performance is unimpeachable; both Harvey and Nethsingha had ties to this ensemble, which is strikingly clean in what is really quite difficult choral material. It may come as a surprise to learn that Harvey, with an essentially conservative British choral language, was invited by none other than Pierre Boulez to join the IRCAM community in France, but after hearing these pieces and reading Nethsingha's informative notes, you'll get an idea of why this happened. Harvey's basic harmonic language and melodic shapes are conventional, but the way he develops them is not. His structures include numerological and other symbolic devices, and pieces often deepen into angular, difficult writing as they proceed. The result is a set of pieces that's accessible, yet offers much to study; that's rigorous, yet responds to texts in a personal way. Some pieces are a cappella, others have an organ. The choral work, from the 1970s and 1980s, is uniformly strong, but perhaps sample the riveting Toccata for organ and tape (track four) for a taste of Harvey's ability to bridge traditional and contemporary idioms, and for the ringing tones of the St. John's organ, always a pleasure. Recommended.