First Person: St John's College choral conductor Christopher Gray on recording 'Lament & Liberation'

When I arrived at St John’s College, Cambridge, in April 2023, it was a daunting prospect to be taking over the reins of a choir with such a distinguished recording heritage: there have been more than 100 albums since the 1950s on some of the UK’s top labels. 

As a teenager, growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, I could often be found in the small number of specialist classical CD sections in Belfast shops such as HMV. The choral selection in such shops back then was dominated by a tiny number of pioneering groups that included St John’s College Choir under George Guest. Like many, I found the vibrant, rich, open-hearted sound of St John’s compelling, and it played a large part in forming my choral instincts and preferences.

Nowadays, many more choirs release albums regularly, and the mainstream repertoire has been recorded many times. In that context, anyone releasing a new album has to ask what they want to achieve. 

Over the decades, the choir at St John’s has recorded music from a wide range of styles and periods and has been a prolific commissioner of new music. For my first album, I wanted to build on this “new music” tradition, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the works written specially to this end by Martin Baker, Joanna Marsh and Helena Paish. 

The Marsh was a big project, resulting in a triptych, Echoes in Time, setting poems by Malcolm Guite (one of which we commissioned) for Advent, Epiphany and Ash Wednesday. These are very special pieces and this YouTube video captures the first movement, "The Hidden Light".

A key objective of the Marsh collaboration was to create pieces rooted in the appropriate Biblical stories that also spoke to “now”. Guite’s poems provided the ideal channel for this ambition, focusing on the vulnerability of the pregnant Mary at a time of social-political turmoil, then the Holy Family as they fled the cruel dictatorship of Herod, and finally the burnt palm crosses of Ash Wednesday reminding us that the forests are being destroyed and daring us to hope that things could be better. 

The Marsh is intended to complement the other triptych on the album, James MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados. This gripping work confronts the horrors of South American military dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s, clothed with liturgical texts that place God alongside and among the victims of unfathomable suffering. MacMillan asks a great deal of the singers in the challenging writing he employs to mirror the immediacy of the poems by Ariel Dorfman and Ana Maria Mendoza.  I wanted to design an album that would reward those who chose to listen to it all the way through, as well as those who wanted to dip into odd tracks. I say more about this in the inlay booklet, but it is perhaps important to note that there is comfort, not least in the final item: through soaring treble lines and rich harmonies in the lower voices, Dobrinka Tabakova’s short work, Turn our captivity, O Lord, hopes that “they that sow in tears shall reap In joy”. (Recording session pictured above by Isabelle Freeman)

I hope that this first album at St John’s will affirm my commitment to continue the work of my predecessors in championing contemporary music, both by commissioning new works and by offering fresh performances of existing works by contemporary composers. This direction of travel feels appropriate for the choir at St John’s, where we have talented young singers with an appetite for new things, rooted in a profound respect for the centuries-old tradition they uphold. 

• Graham Rickson reviews 'Lament & Liberation' on theartsdesk
• Read classical music reviews on theartsdesk