Agnus Dei: Music of Inner Harmony: The Choir of New College Oxford

 (31 customer reviews)

Some of it's secular, much of it's sacred, but Erato's recording, spanning over 300 years of some of the most harmonious and beautiful pieces of vocal music ever written, has something for almost everyone who appreciates classical music. Not only are the performances well-performed, but they also add new interpretations to some well-known pieces. I can safely say that out of more than a dozen or so recordings, this is the most anguished singing I've heard in Barber's Agnus Dei. The Choir of New College sings clearly. The voices pierce in the Agnus Dei, their articulate the liturgy of Miserere mei pleasingly, but they also add some warmth into pieces like Lux Aeterna and Mendelssohn's Hear My Prayer. The tracks are very diverse here, and the order of the pieces was apparently carefully chosen. Barber's famous (and "unkillable") Agnus Dei begins. It's a piece that has been evocative of sorrow for years (the string arrangement was played for services for such...Read more

This is one of those albums that is conceived as a program carefully calculated to give the listener Goosebumps and evoke a tear from the eye. When lesser musicians try to pull such a stunt, the effect is maddening. You feel as though you are being emotionally manipulated, and you resent it. When the efforts of first class musicians such as Higginbottom and the Choir of New College, Oxford, attempt such a feat, it is an emotional, musical, and religious experience. The majority of the repertoire heard on this disc is quite familiar to most listeners in one form or another, but you will rarely hear a choir of such clean, precise and yet passionate sound take on these pieces. The first selection on the disc is Samuel Barber's own transcription of his "Adagio for Strings" to the Mass text, "Agnus Dei." This composition is difficult for string players to keep in tune, so we can imagine how difficult it is for a choir to sustain the pitch a cappella! The New College performance is a...Read more

Edward Higgenbottom is no shrinking violet! Indeed, with the production of Agnus Dei, Agnus Dei II and Nativitas, he has brought the wonderful choir of men and boys called The Choir of New College, Oxford (England) to the forefront of attention. Despite efforts to destroy this form of tradition as "elitist," Dr. Higgenbottom has proved the point: an excellent choir of men and boys must be cherished, and in this particular case, praised.One wonders, when listening to this album, whether the composers of the works represented ever heard their "musical children" performed with such polish, such musicianship, such love. My favorite selection, a difficult decision to be sure, is the Mendelssohn "Hear My Prayer," sung by treble soloist Thomas Herford with rare beauty of voice and an investment of appropriate emotion that separates his singing from that of contemporary boy sopranos.My only quibble is with the subtitle: "music of inner...Read more