This is perhaps a surprisingly competitive field nowadays, and certainly Naxos enters it with a fully competitive programme. They are marvellous works, these products of many loves – for choral sound, for ancient polyphony, for the deeply grained German traditions of serious thought and warm feeling. ‘Academic’ used to be a word that followed them around, and, though it is really an absurd one, it does draw attention to something which the ear alone is unlikely to take in: the complexity of counterpoint that appears so subordinate to expressiveness and yet which (with its hidden canons) must go far towards determining the notes. They are miracles of nineteenth-century composition, flowering in their own natural atmosphere but rooted deeply in the past.
St Bride’s, Fleet Street in London has a choir with a notable history, and now under Robert Jones its justly confident professional singers give performances that are sure in intonation, attack and precision. The parts are well balanced, the tone of the sopranos particularly fresh and clear. They have prepared these difficult motets with care, but – of course there is a ‘but’ – not so as to have convincingly worked them into the system. Compare the RIAS Choir under Marcus Creed. In the Fest- und Gedenkspruche, Brahms’s fine offering for the Hamburg Exhibition of 1889, the German choir take a slightly more relaxed tempo at the start and then perceive more specifically the points for a change of mood or style. Then, in the third number, they find a more easeful appeal to the heart and to good sense in the doctrines of Deuteronomy: they are more inward, more privy to Brahms’s meaning within his notes. Nor is it simply the prerogative of a German choir, for Trinity, Cambridge (under Richard Marlow), sound possibly even more at home: contrast, for instance, their imaginative touch at the return of ‘Wenn ein starker Gewappneter’ in the second number, or their far more successful avoidance of syllabic heaviness in the second (‘O Heiland’) of the Two Motets, Op. 74. The new recording is a fine one, with good, clean performances and bright, clear sound; but I would consider at least these two alternative versions before buying.'