Regent has built an excellent reputation not only for recording quality but also in championing contemporary music. This disc is no exception - a first-class presentation.

It is the first recording dedicated to the choral works of Richard Peat and juxtaposes his sacred with secular compositions. It showcases a composer with a terrific skill for marrying words with an outstanding use of wonderful harmonic language.

Recorded in Ely Cathedral, the rich tonal and textural sounds created by two superb choirs, The Chapel Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and the Girl Choristers of Ely Cathedral have a compelling warmth through Sarah MacDonald’s superb direction.

The effective use of dissonance and homophony make it easy to understand how this talented composer has won the John Armitage Memorial’s anonymous annual Call for Music six times, and many of those pieces are recorded on this album.

His inspirational choice of texts are matched with imaginative writing for voices and, as demonstrated on this disc, a knack for successfully combing vocal lines with trumpet, organ, piano and harp. The young college voices and cathedral girl choristers have a real energy and verdure that bring each piece to life through vocal lines expressively and poignantly sung capturing the meanings of each Peat’s chosen texts and the ensemble is excellent.

The drama of Turbulent Priest with its use of a different type of chanting is presented in this movement with rhythmic energy through clapping with the focus being on the violence of Henry II’s request: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’

Winter Landscape was inspired by Peat’s obsession with Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Winter Landscape with Church. It is essentially a solo trumpet piece, organ and voices come in and out of focus. The inventive use of trumpet and organ create the wintery scene well.

There are a series of song cycles: All These things, Sanctorum Cantuarienses, Watching the Dark, Faces in the Mist and Tread Softly.

Watching in the Dark was commissioned to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of WW1. Peat bookends Binyon’s For the Fallen and effectively portrays the chilling Suicide in the trenches through setting a pastiche folk song and the use of whistling.

Peat’s 2014 work Faces in the mist is a short cycle of songs with harp and once again balance is perfectly judged. Tread softly is a cycle of choral pieces began as a stand-alone setting of Shakespeare’s life-affirming Sonnet 105. Peat cleverly uses the lower voices to start Tread softly and then develops it with the upper voices using clever techniques.

Sarah MacDonald carefully moulds her singers to phrase each composition which gives an intense ambience.

Peat’s brilliant choral writing justly deserves an album to itself as he is a tremendous contemporary music communicator.


For more on Richard Peat https://www.richardpeat.com/