Bob Chilcott has spent most of his life in choral music. He was a solo treble in the
Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and was for many years a member of the elite men's ensemble the
King's Singers. He has also established a reputation as a significant choral composer, arranger, and conductor. This CD collects several of his larger works and arrangements for mixed voices. Chilcott uses a conventional harmonic language lightly spiked with dissonance, but there is a strong lyric impulse and sense of drama underlying his music that sets it apart from the blandness characteristic of many contemporary choral composers. He has a gift for using very simple means to achieve deeply expressive ends. This clarion simplicity is most evident in his lovely setting of the prayer Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the night before his execution, "Even such is time." His cantata for chorus and percussion, The Making of the Drum, takes as its text five spiritually profound poems by Edward Kamau Braithwaite based on Ghanaian rituals associated with drum making. Chilcott's strongly rhythmic setting manages to evoke the repetitive patterns of Ghanaian music without sounding derivative. The six-movement Fragments from his dish, set to an assortment of British and American writings about food, is deftly humorous. Finnish choir
Grex Musicus, conducted by Marjukka Riihimäki, sings with high spirits, rounded tone, and excellent blend. The sound is clean, warm, and nicely resonant.