Magdalena Consort, Fretwork & William Hunt - In Chains of Gold, Vol. 3 (2025) [Hi-Res]

The final volume in this series will be released on February 28th 2025 — centenary year of the death of Orlando Gibbons, with whose consort anthems our project began.

The expanded Magdalena Consort this time included many of the brilliant singers who appeared on our first two CDs plus a few new ones. Triplex (soprano): Imogen Russel & Zoe Brookshaw with Aine Smith & Emily Evans (chorus). Mean (alto): Elisabeth Paul & Joy Sutcliffe. Contratenor (high tenor): Samuel Boden, Hugo Hymas, Nick Madden & Toby Ward. Tenor (baritone): Simon Gallear & Joey Edwards. Bassus (bass): Jimmy Holliday & Peter Harvey (director). Accompanying them again were the incomparable Fretwork and His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts with Silas Wollston on the wondrous Tudor organ.

This project has bought together many of the UK's most distinguished period performance specialists. Our final recording took place in the midst of a rich period of centenaries, celebrating some of the greatest composers who contributed to the wonderful and uniquely English idiom of the verse anthem. William Byrd and the hitherto little known Edmund Hooper, celebrated in our second CD, died in 1623 and 1621 respectively. Orlando Gibbons, to which our first was devoted, died in 1625.

This third CD will contain two large verse anthems by Thomas Tomkins, whose great madrigal collection was published in 1622. Both anthems are incomplete. Know you not, was written for the funeral of Prince Henry in 1612, an event of national catastrophe that inspired countless artistic outpourings of lamentation, of which this is surely the most magnificent. The other, O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance, is the longest in the verse idiom so far unearthed – a highly emotional reaction to the horror and disruption of natural order wrought by the Civil War. It survives only in reduced manuscript parts and has been brought to life in a vituosic feat of reconstruction by John Milsom. Both are highly rhetorical and dramatic, revealing the true soul and purpose of the verse anthem form, that places it arguably amongst the finest artistic products of the English Reformation. Alongside these statuesque works, anthems on a more domestic scale such as John Amner’s Consider, all ye passers by and Richard Nicholson’s When Jesus sat at meat and others by composers scarcely known today, whose anthems are being heard for the first time in over 400 years.