Britten Sacred Choral Works by New College Oxford Choir

The Choir of New College Oxford made a considerable impression with their Couperin disc — the kind of recording that reminds you why period-informed choral singing matters. Now Edward Higginbottom and his boys leap two centuries forward into Britten territory, and the result is something close to essential.

Two discs. Thirty-odd years of sacred output. The scope is generous, the performances more so.

Higginbottom has drawn a deliberate boundary around the collection: music Britten composed for Anglican liturgical use, or that might plausibly have served it. No mixed voices, no orchestral forces, organ and harp the only instruments admitted. That means A Boy Was Born — the Op. 3 choral variations, a remarkable achievement for a nineteen-year-old and still undervalued — stays outside the gate. Higginbottom explained the reasoning to me directly: the score was conceived as a concert piece, and it requires women alongside boys. Fair enough. The War Requiem similarly falls beyond the remit, demanding as it does soloists, mixed choir, boys’ voices, and full orchestra simultaneously. You might argue the edges of these decisions, but the logic holds, and what remains within the frame is substantial enough that you stop missing what isn’t there.

A Ceremony of Carols runs nearly twenty-three minutes here and anchors the first disc with real weight. Britten drafted the work in 1942 — originally for female voices, though the treble version is what we know — and the medieval texts he assembled, drawn from anonymous sources and from the Wedderburn brothers, Robert Southwell, a scrap attributed to William Cornish, give the cycle its particular atmosphere: not quite devotional, not quite secular, hovering somewhere in between. Emma Granger’s harp playing is clean and unaffected, which is exactly right. The instrument can easily go cloying in this repertoire — too much pedal, too much bloom — but Granger keeps the sound spare. The boys match her, their tone bright without being brittle, the tuning in the “Balulalow” movement especially true.

I heard A Ceremony of Carols sung by the boys of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral one December — cold stone, candlelight, the harp resonating in that vast space in ways a recording never quite captures. No recording should be judged against memory. But this one holds its own.

Rejoice in the Lamb, the festival cantata Britten wrote in 1943 for the fiftieth anniversary of St. Matthew’s Northampton, runs the better part of eighteen minutes and is the disc’s most complex offering — emotionally, structurally, in almost every way. Christopher Smart’s text, extracted from the sprawling Jubilate Agno, is famously eccentric: hallucinatory, cataloguing, the product of a mind that spent years confined in a madhouse. Britten heard in it something that conventional piety couldn’t provide. The central movement, “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry” — that sustained, extraordinary passage for baritone — requires a soloist who can sustain long lines while conveying something slightly unhinged, tender and obsessive at once. Higginbottom divides the score into three tracks rather than the ten I’ve seen on at least one other album, and the decision pays off: the work breathes as a whole rather than fragmenting into episodes.

The Hymn to St. Cecilia, Op. 27, is where Britten’s word-setting instincts show at their sharpest. Auden’s text — he and Britten were still close when it was written, before the friendship curdled — moves between formality and sudden lyrical openings, and the five-part unaccompanied writing asks for precise ensemble control and the ability to shift color on a phrase’s turn. New College delivers both.

What holds all of this together is Higginbottom’s sense of proportion. He doesn’t push for effect. The boys sing with clarity and discipline, and there’s a kind of reticence in the conducting — not coldness, but restraint — that serves Britten’s sacred music better than a more demonstrative approach would. Britten himself was a complex figure in relation to faith: drawn to liturgical forms, skeptical of institutional religion, using the Church’s music as a vessel for something more private and more ambivalent. Higginbottom seems to understand that, and he doesn’t resolve the tension so much as let it stand.

This is a distinguished set. Buy it.