World premiere recordings

Conductor-composer Ronald Corp couples two supremely engaging choral works of our time, pairing his own cantata And all the Trumpets Sounded (of 1989) with Michael Hurd’s appealing choral symphony The Shepherd’s Calendar (of 1975). The baritone soloist in And all the Trumpets Sounded is Mark Stone, in The Shepherd’s Calendar, Roderick Williams. And all the Trumpets Sounded was written as a companion piece to Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem, setting Whitman and First World War poets interspersed with the words of the Requiem Mass and focusing on war, the dead and the trumpets of the last judgement framed by the Dies Irae. This is virile and intensely moving music. Hurd’s choral symphony The Shepherd’s Calendar sets words by John Clare for chorus with baritone solo. The movements follow the year from January to May (the scherzo), ending in the fourth movement with the time span from September, Hurd’s engaging choral writing and evocative orchestration perfectly attuned to a poetic vision of the circling year. Here the soloist is Roderick Williams, supremely eloquent in the third movement with a poignant soaring baritone solo ‘O Love is So Deceiving!’ – the unfamiliar but immediately attractive music causing a sensation in the control room during recording, so telling is Hurd’s setting.