Welcome Joy

A CELEBRATION OF WOMEN’S VOICES
Our second album on Chandos Records, spotlighting women’s voices in collaboration with harpist Louise Thomson.
Released 27 September 2024

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TRACKS

 

ABOUT

“Welcome Joy” sees Corvus Consort’s upper voices team up with harpist Louise Thomson, under the direction of Freddie Crowley, to present glorious music for upper voices and harp in celebration of visionary women’s voices, both vocal and compositional.

The music of Imogen Holst provides the recording’s cornerstone. Her setting of pastoral poetry by John Keats, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow (1951), opens the disc, and is a collection of six wonderfully vibrant movements which include characterful depictions of the rural Devon landscape. Her fabulous speech-like vocal lines are matched by brilliantly idiomatic harp writing, a skill shared by her father Gustav Holst in his renowned Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda. This masterful set of four luminous hymns exemplifies both his fascination with ancient Hindu mythology and his championing of women’s voices and musical education for women as Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls’ School for nearly 30 years. His dazzling Two Eastern Pictures date from the same period, and are similarly influenced by his close study of Sanskrit texts with trailblazing female Pali and Sanskrit scholar Mabel Haynes Bode during that time. The inclusion of both works also coincides with the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst’s birth.

Indian-American composer Shruthi Rajasekar was commissioned by Corvus Consort to respond directly to Gustav Holst’s use of the Rig Veda, producing her two new works Ushās and Priestess, which both receive their premiere recordings on “Welcome Joy”. Drawing on her dual training in the Carnatic and Western Classical traditions, Rajasekar was perfectly positioned to create a well-informed response to Holst’s treatment of ancient Sanskrit texts, reframed through a contemporary lens. Ushās sets a Sanskrit text from the Rig Veda and explores the Namanarayani raga through improvisatory aleatoric textures, while Priestess uses a Latin text by Titus Livius to reimagine secret all-female gatherings in ancient Italian societies as “places where women could be together in joy”.

Elizabeth Poston’s An English Day-Book (1967) is a wonderful cycle charting the course of a day in the English countryside, packed with strikingly vivid musical depictions of bells, clocks, songbirds, owls and a mischievous bumblebee. Its eleven short movements take the listener from the curfew bell through a dramatic night curse, to the brightness of morning, the calm of summer noon, and the elation of a hot summer’s afternoon, before returning to the cool of evening once more. This is the first recording of a new performing edition of the work, published by pioneering arts and education charity Multitude of Voyces – now the musical and literary executor of Poston’s creative estate – prepared by cross-referencing all known sketches, drafts, and manuscripts in Poston’s hand with surviving correspondence and contemporary accounts from performers.

The album is completed with a set of sublime works by living composers, commissioned by Multitude of Voyces as part of a project to mark International Women’s Day in 2019. Judith Weir (who celebrates her 70th birthday this year), Hilary Campbell (b. 1983), and Gemma McGregor (b. 1965) set texts from Revelations of Divine Love by 14th-century ascetic Julian of Norwich (widely regarded to be the earliest surviving English language text known to be by a woman), while Olivia Sparkhall (b. 1976), contributes an exquisitely atmospheric setting of Lux aeterna, the beautiful communion antiphon from the requiem mass.

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Performers

SINGERS
Hannah Littleton, Sarah Keating, Sumei Bao-Smith
Ailsa Campbell, Clover Willis, Natalie Houlston
Anna Semple, Ella Rainbird-Earley, Ellie Stamp
Chloe Wedlake, Izzi Blain, Joy Sutcliffe

 

CD REVIEWS

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BBC Music Magazine, Ashutosh Khandekar

★★★★★

RECORDING OF THE MONTH: DECEMBER 2024

“Immaculate collection: Corvus Consort, Louise Thomson and Freddie Crowley are dazzling.”
“Ashutosh Khandekar is captivated by the Corvus Consort and harpist Louise Thomson’s shimmering song showcase.”
“Under its founder-director Freddie Crowley, Corvus Consort is always full of fresh thinking.”
“Corvus’s grasp of a more authentic classical Indian musical style in Ushās – Goddess of Dawn is impressive, with convincing pronunciation of the Sanskrit texts.”
“The 12 superb sopranos and altos of the Corvus Consort sing the complex, close-knit textures of these works with delicacy and pinpoint accuracy. Louise Thomson’s immaculate, virtuosic harp playing conjures scenes that take us from scented gardens to sun-baked landscapes and haunted moonlit forests. The vocal/instrumental balance is wellnigh perfect in Chandos’s clear, nuanced recording.”
“The palette may be restricted, but Crowley and his young singers have opened up a jewel-box of glinting, shimmering choral gems, shining anew.”

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Gramophone Magazine, Jeremy Dibble

“Supported sensitively by harpist Louise Thomson, these are all beautifully sung by the Corvus Consort under their director Freddie Crowley, and recorded with admirable clarity by Chandos.”

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Limelight Magazine, Clive Paget

EDITOR’S CHOICE: NOVEMBER 2024

“[Gustav Holst’s Two Eastern Pictures] highlight the virtues of the 12-strong Corvus Consort under inspirational conductor Freddie Crowley: clean, clear voices, impeccable intonation and a direct, engaged way with the texts… fresh, flexible young voices, ideal in this repertoire.”
“They perform here alongside harpist Louise Thomson whose faultless technique copes magnificently with a diverse range of moods and styles.”
“Free from wobble, in Corvus’ hands Holst’s modal harmonies ring true, their blend generally sitting easy on the ear. The same is true of the composer’s more demanding Rig Veda settings. Hymn to the Dawn is suave and spicy, Hymn to the Waters delightfully sprung, and Hymn of the Travellers thrusting and evocative.”
“[In Imogen Holst’s Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow,] Corvus is far fleeter of foot than the Sixteen on a recording released last year, their forces leaner, nimbler and more obviously rooted in the text. Teignmouth is beautifully balmy, Lullaby haunting and ethereal, and Over the Hill and Over the Dale delicately elfin.”
“Beautifully recorded in a clean, word-friendly acoustic, and presented in detailed SACD sound, Welcome Joy should appeal to all lovers of English choral music.”

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The Arts Desk, Bernard Hughes

“They are an innovative and top-drawer ensemble, presenting their second album on Chandos, after Revoiced, their excellent 2022 collaboration with the Ferio Saxophone Quartet.”
“Best known are the Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, in which the choir are spry in the first, elegantly long-breathed in the second and ghostly and distant in the third.”
“[In Shruthi Rajasekar’s new commissions,] Corvus Consort really glisten, the sound bright and almost overwhelming in places.”

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British Music Society, Gary Higginson

“The Corvus ensemble consist[s] of 12 young and fresh-voiced sopranos and altos… the choir’s diction is focused and clear.”
“Freddie Crowley cultivates an ideal vocal balance even in the more complex polyphonic passages, and they are always immaculately accompanied by Louise Thomson.”

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AllMusic, James Manheim

CLASSICAL HIGHLIGHT: OCTOBER 2024

“The relatively young Corvus Consort … has gained attention for a pristine choral blend married to fresh programming ideas.”
“… an ethereal quality in the singing …”
“… there is a great deal of variety here despite the consistent ensemble.”
“A beautiful recording that continues to promise much from its young performers and their director, Freddie Crowley, this album made classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2024.”

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Yorkshire Times, Andrew Palmer

“With a group of 12 upper voices, they excel in their ensemble blend and word clarity… Crowley has curated a programme of exquisite repertoire, encompassing a century’s worth of music for upper voice and harp.”
“The musical writing [of Shruthi Rajasekar’s new commission Priestess] is captivating… Olivia Sparkhall’s Lux Aeterna for double choir is beautiful; the musical writing captures the spirit of eternal light.”

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CONCERT REVIEWS

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Claire Tocknell, Artistic Director of Church Stretton Festival

(concert at Church Stretton Festival on 29 July 2022)

“This unusual combination of upper voices and solo harp fully lived up to my hopes with a very well-structured programme… The voices were superbly blended, words were clear and Freddie Crowley conducted with sensitivity and precision. The audience were captivated, responding to the performers’ evident enjoyment by giving a warm response in return which resulted in a very special atmosphere.”

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The Moorlander, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

(concert at Whiddon Autumn Festival on 16 September 2023)

“The concert for harp and women’s voices was utterly transcendent. The combination is one of music’s most sublime sound-worlds…
Director Freddie Crowley gave a short and entertaining pre-concert talk which added greatly to the enjoyment and understanding of the music. The stand-out work for me was Lux Aeterna by composer, Olivia Sparkhall. In this sublime, soul-stilling work, four of the singers stood some distance behind the other performers, half-hidden within the shadowy chancel of Moretonhampstead Church. The shimmering antiphonal effect was ineffable, elemental, even verging on the mythic.”

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With thanks for the support of the Holst Society