Stanford and Parry Choral Works – Kings Consort

Even before the disc spins, there’s something worth noting. This is Robert King and the King’s Consort’s hundredth release — and with it they inaugurate their own label, Vivat, which will carry not only their future work but recordings by other artists as well. A centenary, a new imprint, and music that might surprise anyone who’s followed King’s career. He has been identified, almost exclusively, with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vivaldi, Handel, Schütz — that territory. So finding him here in the late Victorian and Edwardian soundworld of Stanford and Parry is, at first, a bit of a jolt.

It shouldn’t be, really.

King brings to this repertoire exactly the kind of editorial rigor and historical seriousness he’d apply to a Monteverdi vespers. All four of Stanford’s Evening Canticle settings appear here in the composer’s own orchestrations — rarely heard, seldom recorded, and genuinely revelatory. These aren’t the familiar organ-accompanied versions you’d encounter on a Sunday evening at King’s College. They’re lusher, more specific in color, and they reveal a Stanford who knew his way around an orchestra with considerably more sophistication than his reputation sometimes allows.

The scholarly care extends well past the printed score. Crispian Steel-Perkins sourced six period trumpets — instruments built between 1880 and 1923, matching the dates of the music itself. The woodwind, brass, and percussion follow the same principle. Strings go back further still. A full instrument list, with provenance and dates, appears in the booklet. This is the kind of detail that can feel like pedantry on paper and revelation in practice — and here it’s the latter. The brass in Parry’s Coronation Te Deum have a particular brightness, almost a rawness, that modern instruments tend to smooth away.

Then there’s the organ question. King chose the Father Willis instrument at Hereford Cathedral — built in 1892, which puts it squarely in the period — but rather than overdubbing it separately, some digital sleight of hand allowed the organ, played live in Hereford, to be relayed in real time to St. Jude’s Church in London, where the rest of the ensemble was gathered and recorded. The result is seamless. You don’t hear a seam. The organ sits inside the texture the way it should, not laid on top like a garnish.

Parry’s “I was glad” is given here not in its original 1902 Coronation version but in the 1911 revision for George V — which means we get an expanded set of Vivats, honoring both the King and Queen Mary. It matters more than you might expect. The added material alters the weight and proportion of the piece, and King’s account has genuine processional grandeur without tipping into bombast. Carolyn Sampson and David Wilson-Johnson contribute ably in their solo moments, Sampson in particular bringing a clear, unforced tone that the music’s ceremonial surface can sometimes obscure.

Blest Pair of Sirens is the one exception to the editorial thoroughness — it’s played from the Novello edition of around 1890, which is what most conductors use anyway. No great loss. The interpretation is warm and well-shaped, the choral blend convincingly of a piece. But it’s the Stanford canticles that linger. The B-flat setting, Op. 10, dates from 1879, when Stanford was still in his twenties — and there’s something almost Brahmsian in the way the harmonies move, a richness that the orchestration here makes audible in ways the organ version simply cannot. The G major set, Op. 81, is tauter, more assured; the A major, Op. 12, has an almost Schubertian sweetness in the “Nunc dimittis” that catches you off guard.

Jeremy Dibble, the leading authority on both composers, edited most of the scores and wrote the booklet note — and it’s among the more genuinely useful essays I’ve read in a disc of this kind. Not just biographical scaffolding, but actual musical thinking.

Jerusalem, orchestrated by Elgar from Parry’s original, closes the program. Three minutes. It earns its place.

This is a disc that makes a serious argument — that Stanford and Parry, for too long treated as historical furniture, repay exactly this quality of attention. King has made that case before with earlier repertoire. He makes it again here, and persuasively.