Rutter: Hymn to the Creator of Light

“This truly rich advent feast is performed wonderfully well on all counts and can be highly recommended” Organists Review

“Another Oxbridge college, another fine mixed-voice choir, another gorgeously captured chapel acoustic (Mike Hatch engineering) - this selection of favourite pieces by mainly British composers makes a pleasingly intimate impression.” BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2012 ****

“the choral singing is superb...I really enjoyed this record and looked forward to playing it often. The excellence of the singing coupled with the aptness of the selection make this collection special.” MusicWeb International, November 2012

“a disc of mainstream Christmas music...which showcases the combined forces of the college's chapel choir, with its top line of boys, and the mixed-voice college choir. It's a performance of full, rich sounds from a group who are among the unsung heroes of a collegiate choir circuit currently dominated by the larger colleges.” Gramophone Magazine, December 2012

“This is an attractive and very well-planned disc of music from Advent to Epiphany … The sound is unobtrusively excellent and the booklet includes complete sung texts. If the programme appeals (as it certainly does me), then my advice is to let yourself be tempted” International Record Review, December 2012

“Here is music finely crafted, written with love for the art and an especial care for choral sound” Gramophone Magazine

“A radiant richness of sound” Penguin Guide

“Here is music finely crafted, written with love for the art and an especial care for choral sound.
It's melodious without being commonplace, harmonically rich without being sticky, modern in the graceful way of a child who grows up responsive to newness but not wanting to kick his elders in the teeth. He gives us the heart's desire. But he's on too familiar terms with our heart's desires, he doesn't extend them, or surprise us into realising that they were deeper and subtler than we thought. This is by way of cautiously savouring a remembered taste, which could readily be indulged without perceived need for an interval: one item leads to another and before we know it the pleasurable hour is over. The Requiem is the longest work; the other pieces vary from two to just over six minutes.
Most are unaccompanied and show the choir of 25 voices as another of those expert groups of assured and gifted professionals that are among the principal adornments of modern musical life. Their capacity as a virtuoso choir is tested in the Cantate Domino and Choral Fanfare, but Rutter writes for real singers (not just singer-musicians) and their tone is unfailingly beautiful. The two soloists are excellent.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The cherubs of Tewkesbury Abbey sing with devotion, faithfully capturing Rutter’s particular brand of luxury comfort” Time Out, August 2012

“Rutter’s music has that magical uniqueness about it in being able to straddle the school of light lyrical touch with that of musical sophistication and integrity. Sure enough, it inspires beautifully scented performances from the boys and men ... augmented variously by gorgeous solo contributions on oboe, cello and trumpet, and from organist Carleton Etherington” The Scotsman, August 2012

“this disc must command our attention. The Tewkesbury Singers produce a well-focused tone throughout … Special attention ought to be made of Carleton Etherington’s sensitive support on the organ. Excellent liner notes and full texts” Choir & Organ, November/December 2012

“Even when Rutter's very obviously in crowd-pleasing mode...the vernal freshness of the Tewkesbury boys' voices strips off the cloying patina more knowing, self-conscious adult voices often add in this music. There's plenty of technical control in the choir's singing, but it's not imposed with undue rigour.” BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2012 ****

“This CD is a valuable addition to the John Rutter discography and shows that the composer is more than simply 'Mr Christmas'...I can imagine the composer being well satisfied with the highly accomplished performances...The trebles have a rich, uninhibited tone and the whole choir are masters of sustained, seamless legato singing. Director Benjamin Nicholas favours flowing tempi and he achieves an excellent balance between all voices.” Gramophone Magazine, February 2013

“This 60th-birthday tribute brings together a selection of John Rutter's short anthems and folksong arrangements, plus a couple of extracts from his Requiem. Impeccably crafted, they're invariably neatly and effectively composed, and not too difficult for amateur choirs. These performances given under the composer's baton by a choir he founded are faultless and presumably definitive. The sound is warm and lucid.” BBC Music Magazine, October 2005

“Retrospectively the disc's final item, Ligeti's Luxaeterna, dominates the recital. Not only does it make an indelible impression, but it also casts its light over the entire programme and style of singing.
To a listener who has not heard it before (a slightly smaller category than might be thought, as the piece was used in the film 2001: A SpaceOdyssey) it may even come as the light on the road to Damascus, a blinding revelation of unknown choral sonorities. An extraordinary sound–world is opening up, with long, finely ruled streams of light, a spectrum of colours wide as the distance from heaven to earth, and all mingling eventually within the cavern of a great bell. The challenge to singers (even when assisted by the reverberance of Ely Cathedral's Lady Chapel) is formidable indeed, and these young voices (with lungs and ears involved also) do marvellously well. And so they do throughout. The quality of choral tone here is remarkable: no thready sopranos, none of those bone–dry basses, but a sound that, though strictly disciplined in the matter of vibrato, is still fresh and natural. They achieve wonders of crescendo, as in William Harris's Bring us, O LordGod, and their opening chords (in Tallis's O natalux for instance) are as if cut by the sharpest slicer ever made. Even so, this smooth, flawless beauty of sound is, in some contexts, like the modern beauty of the face of a heroine in some televised piece of period–drama. Josquin Desprez's Nuncdimittis is an example: the singing is extremely beautiful, but conceptually (and not just in the women's voices) seems anachronistic. It's as though they have worked on their programme with the precept 'All choral music aspires to the condition of Ligeti'. A wondrous record, all the same.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010