Choir of Trinity College Cambridge / Stephen Layton FINZI

What a beautifully crafted disc this is – not just in its quality (and it really is Trinity at their absolute best) but also in its shape and programming. An all-Finzi recital sounds straightforward enough; but in opening with the Magnificat and closing with the monumental anthem Lo, the full, final sacrifice, Stephen Layton transforms it from a collage into a cycle. We move from birth to death, Incarnation to Crucifixion, from the anticipation of the Annunciation to the fulfilment of the Eucharist.

The composer’s secular music is also carefully folded into this sacred narrative. The fragility and brush-away slightness of Finzi’s Robert Bridges settings and the part-song ‘White-flowering days’ come into their own here – portraits of a world already receding into the distance, the Calvary Cross rising up in the foreground.

He may have given us concertos and anthems, cantatas and chamber music but Finzi is, above all, a song composer. Trinity and Layton never let you forget that in performances in which 30 voices sing as one, where collective statements become private, lyric utterances. There’s a lightness to the unisons (a recurring Finzi gesture) and an organic, blossoming quality to the counterpoint that gives these choral works a first-person immediacy. Which makes it all the more startling when the congregation does burst in, reminding us where we are.

You have to hear the filmy, rhapsodic lightness of the Henry Vaughan setting ‘Welcome sweet and sacred feast’ to really startle at the arresting opening of ‘God is gone up’ (where the choir are joined by Trinity Brass, led by no less than David Blackadder on trumpet) – a trick Layton plays again by cutting from the brilliance of the lithe, ecstatic ‘Wherefore tonight so full of care’ into the sober, muttered darkness of Lo, the full, final sacrifice.

Finzi’s Magnificat famously lacks either a Gloria or an answering Nunc dimittis. Rather than use Holst’s familiar setting of the latter, Layton instead gives us David Bednall’s graceful 2016 setting. It’s a work with too much of its own voice for straight pastiche, but which is absolutely steeped in Finzi’s language – an affectionate, serious musical homage that takes the composer as a jumping-off point for its own lovely invention. Along with the beautiful cover art – an image of Gloucester Cathedral’s Finzi Memorial Window – and excellent booklet notes by Francis Pott, it’s just another bonus from this outstanding release. (Alexandra Coghlan / Gramophone)

Polyphony / Stephen Layton ARVO PÄRT Triodion

There's a line in this disc's title track, from an Orthodox ode addressed to Saint Nicholas: "therewithal hast thou acquired: by humility - greatness, by poverty - riches." This might have been written about Arvo Pärt's compositional technique, here liberated from the minimalist strictures of earlier decades, treading a fine line between agony and ecstasy in a way unparalleled since Bach.

In his earlier vein, Pärt often reached spiritual feast through the technical famine of systematic patterning and repetition. In the music on this new CD, all composed between 1996 and 2002 and featuring six première recordings, Pärt instead suggests austerity through the use of a much broader and freer palette. This is particularly palpable in the Nunc Dimittis, where gorgeous textures, harmonies and sonorities conjure a feeling of purity and emptiness.

Elsewhere, Pärt has a couple of surprises up his sleeve. The opening track, Dopo la vittoria, begins in sprightly madrigalian form, entirely appropriate to a commission from the City of Milan. It sets an Italian text describing the conception of the Te Deum by Saints Ambrose and Augustine, an unusually postmodern exercise for Pärt, but one which does nothing to detract from the sincerity of the setting, suggesting instead a celebration of the sanctifying power of centuries of worshipful use.

The weirdest moment on the disc comes with My heart's in the Highlands, a setting of a Burns poem which apparently has a highly personal significance for the composer. It's one of only two tracks on the disc which recall Pärt's earlier, more systematic approach, giving Burns' wistful evocation of the bucolic North to a monotone counter-tenor over a strictly controlled organ accompaniment, and making the text suddenly sound like a mystical allegory of longing for the divine.

There's little of the balletic brilliance that Pärt displayed in such works as the Stabat Mater or Tabula Rasa, and mercifully as little of the thunderous severity of his Passio mode. Instead there's a quiet and cumulative power to these works, given performances of luminous purity by Polyphony and Stephen Layton. By the time we arrive at the Salve Regina, a kind of penitential cradle song which closes the disc, we're ready to fall at the feet of the Maker and beg for forgiveness, simultaneously harrowed and consoled. (BBC Music)

The Choir of Trinity College Cambrdige / Orchestra of The Age of Enlightenment / Stephen Layton BACH Christmas Oratorio

 Two new Christmas Oratorio recordings in time for Christmas, and both from forces that give regular concert presentations of the piece, one at St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, and the other at St John’s Smith Square in London. As such they are not greatly challenging to ‘normal’ expectations, but then that is the point: what you get here are good, sound performances that will not upset anyone and will surely give pleasure to most who hear them.

I mean that about not upsetting anyone: not so long ago a recording of this music by the 84-strong Leipzig Thomanerchor and the Gewandhaus Orchestra would have stayed many a buying hand, but things are different now. Germany has become the place where ‘modern-instrument’ orchestras play Baroque music best; and, except for a slight blandness in the continuo, the once-stodgy Gewandhaus’s grasp of current Baroque stylistic orthodoxy under Thomas cantor Biller seems total, while their technical ease (particularly in the brass) is a genuine enhancement. As for the Thomanerchor, the relevance to listeners of its tradition as ‘Bach’s choir’ is probably more romantic than realistic but the thrill of it is still there and can perhaps be detected in a recording at least partly made at live concerts in St Thomas’s. What we can say is that they have a typically fruity German boy sound, never seem like 84 singers (in a good way), and, despite strong underlying discipline, seem able to enjoy the more joyous moments with true enthusiasm. Except for the tenderly comforting Ingeborg Danz, the soloists (including two boy sopranos) are adequate without offering any particular insights.

Older, though not by all that much, are the 38 mixed voices of Trinity College Choir, again very well trained, especially in matters of firm text enunciation. They are less raw in the lower voices, more focused overall than the Thomaners and more agile, too, in numbers such as ‘Ehre sei Gott’ or the opening of Part 5. The soloist line-up here is in general superior both technically and interpretatively, especially the ever-incisive James Gilchrist. Newcomer Katherine Watson’s fresh-voiced sound is a world away from the Leipzig boys but lestyn Davies’s impressive messa di voce in ‘Schlafe, mein Liebster’ is not the start of a performance to match the protective warmth of Danz. If not quite at its best, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment sounds thoroughly at home (David Blackadder gives a very suave trumpet solo in ‘Grosser Herr’), and Stephen Layton conducts with care and expertise. But of the two recordings it is somehow the Leipzig one that has that little bit more heart. (Gramophone)

Polyphony / Stephen Layton KARL JENKINS Motets

 Following the huge success of over 2 million records sold with critically acclaimed albums such as Adiemus, The Armed Man, The Peacemakers and Requiem, Karl Jenkins presents his brand new album!

Motets is an intimate a capella album that features stunning new choral adaptions of Jenkins’ previous hit compositions and marks the year of his 70th birthday and fifty years of his career in music.

As a composer and a brand – a brand that stands for an epic sound that connects with people from all different age groups on a spiritual level - Karl Jenkins remains one of the most performed living composers in the world today. The concept Motets goes back in time and celebrates his hits from the past in a newly arranged intimate sound – accessible, performable, emotional.

Recent reviews declare Polyphony “one of the best small choirs now before the public” (Telegraph) and “possibly the best small professional chorus in the world” (Encore Magazine, USA)

Carolyn Sampson / Britten Sinfonia / Stephen Layton EŠENVALDS Passion and Resurrection

Australian concert-goers have sampled the mesmerising choral sound of the Baltic as championed by Stephen Layton in 2010. Now Layton and his British group Polyphony introduce the young Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds, whose a cappella and accompanied choral works are accessible for their heartfelt expressions of suffering and joy.

The Latvian struggle for independence from the Soviet Union has been dubbed the “Singing Revolution”, in which freedom fighters raised their voices in a chorus of forbidden songs.

His Passion draws on sacred texts in English and Latin, and the impossibly pure Polyphony tone wrings devastating emotional impact from every syllable. The warm plainchant opening is gradually submerged in glassy string dissonance from the Britten Sinfonia. Extreme changes of mood and atmosphere fade seamlessly into one another so that the climax’s stormy repetitions of “crucify!” lull themselves into the gentlest of prayers.

Carolyn Sampson’s haunting, at times visceral soprano solos place Passion and Resurrection alongside other contemporary classics like Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The works on the album pay tribute to womankind, from soaring soprano lines to texts by American women poets and Mother Teresa, as well as depictions of Mary Magdalene and the stabat mater.

The Sara Teasdale setting Evening describes a “chorus of shimmering sound”, a phrase that equally applies to the disc as a whole. Two decades have passed since Latvia achieved independence but we are still hearing a “singing revolution”, with Esenvalds leading the charge. (Copyright © Limelight Magazine).