Stephen Hough's choral music is explored on a new album released today from the London Choral Sinfonia and conductor Michael Waldron. The album, titled ‘Mirabilis - The Music of Stephen Hough’ (on Orchid Classics), includes the Missa Mirabilis (the Agnus Dei from which you can watch a video performance of below), December, Marian Hymns, O soft self-wounding pelican, as well as an arrangement of Danny Boy. 

As Hough relates in the sleeve notes for the album, the Missa Mirabilis was written at the time of a shocking car accident: 'I stepped out of the one, untouched door in my completely mangled car with my Mass manuscript and my body intact, then wrote part of the Agnus Dei in St Mary’s Hospital, waiting for four hours for a brain scan. I was conscious, as I was somersaulting with screeching metallic acrobatics on the M1, of feeling regret that I would never get to hear the music on which I’d been working so intensely in the days before. Someone had other ideas.'

Listen to the new album on Apple Music: