Boyce: Ode to St. Cecilia – New College Choir

Handel cast a long shadow, and English music of the eighteenth century has spent two and a half centuries trying to climb out from under it. William Boyce, court composer, organist, gifted contrapuntist, and eventually so deaf he had to give up conducting his own works, deserves better than the footnote status history has assigned him. This newly recorded Ode, unheard on disc until now — bar a stray overture that once found its way into print separately — makes the case with real persuasion.

The piece dates from 1739, early Boyce, though “early” is relative for a composer who lived to sixty-seven and kept producing fluently his whole career. London first, then Dublin two years later, where the vocal roster overlapped strikingly with the singers who would premiere Messiah the following season. Everybody sang everything. Careers were built city to city, commission to commission, and Boyce’s Ode sat comfortably in that same performing ecology that produced Handel’s late oratorios.

Sixty-eight minutes is no trifle. Four choruses anchor the structure, and New College Choir dispatch the counterpoint with real bite. You hear inner voices that in lesser performances get swallowed by reverberant acoustic or muddy balances. Not here. The engineering lets Boyce’s part-writing breathe, and it’s more resourceful than his reputation suggests — closer, at moments, to the density of Purcell than to Handelian homophony.

The solo writing is where the disc’s personal stamp emerges. Patrick Burrowes, a boy soprano cast — fittingly — as St. Cecilia herself, brings an unforced, silvery tone that never strains for effect. There’s something almost eerie about hearing a treble voice carry the patron saint of music through her own celebratory ode. Michael George, the most seasoned singer in this lineup, offers the standout number of Part I, an aria with obbligato trumpet where his bass has both weight and agility, negotiating the ornamentation without ever turning ponderous. William Purefoy gets the loveliest tune on the whole disc, “Music, Gently Soothing Power,” an alto solo of real melodic tenderness, sung here with a purity of line that lingers after the disc stops. Andrew Watts, cast in the “high tenor” role the Dublin reading apparently required, and Richard Edgar-Wilson round out a cast that shows a consistent, well-schooled sense of period style: no wide Romantic vibrato smearing the ornaments, no anachronistic weight dragging down the dance-inflected numbers.

Graham Lea-Cox leads the Hanover Band with tempos that breathe rather than race, textures kept light, trumpets and strings balanced with real ear for Boyce’s occasionally surprising scoring choices.

Are there more electrifying accounts of English baroque choral music on disc? Gardiner’s Purcell, certain Pinnock Handel sets, set a higher voltage. But that’s comparing genres, almost. Within its own modest sphere this is a scholarly and musically satisfying release, unpretentious, well prepared, and it makes an argument. Boyce remains underplayed; somewhere in Doncaster there’s an orchestra bearing his name since 1969, which tells you the flame has been kept, however faintly. Recordings like this one deserve to fan it. Recommended to anyone curious about what English music sounded like when it wasn’t simply imitating its adopted German genius.