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Lament & Liberation

Kevin Ke (soprano), Samuel Smith (soprano), Montague Tatnell (soprano), Ingrid Birchall (soprano), Joseph Hancock (soprano), Arthur Cobb (soprano), Alice Markham (vocalist), James Gant (tenor), Martha Gritten (soprano), Matthew Monaghan (vocalist), Alexander Robson, Choir of St John's College Cambridge,...

Lament & Liberation

Awards:

Christopher Gray’s first album with St John’s College is an unflinchingly serious programme of contemporary music, ambitious and challenging for both singers and listeners alike...The choir’s...

Lament & Liberation

Kevin Ke (soprano), Samuel Smith (soprano), Montague Tatnell (soprano), Ingrid Birchall (soprano), Joseph Hancock (soprano), Arthur Cobb (soprano), Alice Markham (vocalist), James Gant (tenor), Martha Gritten (soprano), Matthew Monaghan (vocalist), Alexander Robson, Choir of St John's College Cambridge,...

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Awards:

Christopher Gray’s first album with St John’s College is an unflinchingly serious programme of contemporary music, ambitious and challenging for both singers and listeners alike...The choir’s...

About

The first album from the Choir of St John’s with their new music director - Christopher Gray. Leaning into the college’s well-established tradition of championing new music, at the heart of the programme are two triptychs: James MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados, composed 35 years ago, and Joanna Marsh’s Echoes in Time, commissioned by the College in recent months. There is also a new choral work by Helena Paish and a new organ work by Martin Baker alongside existing works by Roxanna Panufnik and Dobrinka Tabakova. The commissioned works were conceived with the distinctive environment of St Johns’ Victorian chapel (designed by George Gilbert Scott and consecrated in May 1869), its organ and its fine, world-famous choir which has done service since its post-Restoration establishment in the 1670s.

Artists

Kevin Ke (soprano), Samuel Smith (soprano), Montague Tatnell (soprano), Ingrid Birchall (soprano), Joseph Hancock (soprano), Arthur Cobb (soprano), Alice Markham (vocalist), James Gant (tenor), Martha Gritten (soprano), Matthew Monaghan (vocalist), Alexander Robson, Choir of St John's College Cambridge, Christopher Gray

Contents and tracklist

I. The Hidden Light
Track length6:22
II. Refugee
Track length4:27
III. Still to Dust
Track length6:13
I. Identity
Track length9:21
II. Virgin of Guadalupe
Track length9:17
III. Sun stone
Track length5:49

Spotlight on this release

Awards and reviews

  • BBC Music Magazine
    July 2025
    Choral Choice

July 2025

Christopher Gray’s first album with St John’s College is an unflinchingly serious programme of contemporary music, ambitious and challenging for both singers and listeners alike...The choir’s account of MacMillan’s sprawling, highly expressive score is full of urgency and drama, punctuated by outbursts of anger, plumbing the darkness of this brutal chapter in South America’s history.

July 2025

Now with musical choices that nod to the climate emergency, refugee crisis, political violence and oppression, the choir calls attention to change without: using the polite, decorative context of choral music for activism, elite Oxbridge personnel to advocate for representation...Can we yet hear Gray’s impact in the singing itself? The mixed upper voices still feel like a work in progress, their sonic identity under construction. But clarity – of delivery and emotional intent – are well established.
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