Kate Wakeling is moved by this album from US countertenor Reginald Mobley
CHORAL & SONG CHOICE
Because
Traditional songs and spirituals, plus works by Burleigh, Florence Price, Strong and Trotignon
Reginald Mobley (countertenor), Baptiste Trotignon (piano)
Alpha Classics ALPHA 936 55:26 mins
Countertenor Reginald Mobley has forged a stellar career across Baroque and Classical repertoire, and this outstanding album finds him on glittering form as an exponent of the Spiritual.
In 1925, the Johnson Brothers compiled and edited the first volume of their two books of Spirituals, which they deemed to be ‘unsurpassed among the folk songs of the world and, in the poignancy of their beauty, unequalled’. The selection is shaped around these remarkable songs, most of them in deft and bittersweet jazz arrangements by the album’s pianist Baptiste Trotignon. Among many highlights, ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ fizzes with urgency and quickly establishes Mobley’s extraordinary vocal flair, while his beautifully soft rendition of ‘Steal Away’ perhaps tugs most powerfully at the heartstrings, heightened by Patrick Dupre Quigley’s introspective arrangement based from start to finish around a pulsing pedal note.
There are also a number of older arrangements and works, including Harry Thacker Burleigh’s delicate ‘Jean’ and Florence Price’s wrenchingly powerful ‘Resignation’, which sets the composer’s own poetry. A special addition is a bravura account of Whitfield and Strong’s ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’, made famous by Marvin Gaye in his 1967 recording and given a soaring new treatment here.
For all its beauty, the album also feels like a call to action. The horrors of racial violence cannot be separated from this repertoire, and a sense of urgent injustice is brought home by these performances of dignity and power.
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING
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Kerensa Briggs
Requiem; Prelude on ‘Pange lingua’; The Windsor Service; Inner Light; Psalm 121 ‘I will lift up mine eyes’
The Choir of King’s College London/ Joseph Fort; Richard Gowers (organ)
Delphian DCD34298 55:57 mins
Kerensa Briggs may only be in her early thirties, but this resplendent first portrait album is fruitful evidence of a long immersion in choral singing. Having grown up around cathedrals thanks to her organist father, Briggs is now enriching the choral repertoire herself. Much of her writing develops from
