This is one of the first recordings of the Christ Church choir under their new director, Stephen Darlington, who succeeded Francis Grier three years ago. And it bodes extremely well for the future. The sound is above all things unaffected: clear trebles with a nice breathy edge, altos who blend well with them in the six-voice textures of the Mass, tenors and basses who can sometimes sound a little characterless but always fit extremely well. The Nimbus engineers have given them a somewhat distant sound in Dorchester Abbey, but the details are very clear and excellently balanced.
The Mass Dum complerentur is in many ways a gentle work, characterized particularly by descending scale passages. Darlington perhaps does well to adopt a restrained approach, with a nicely fluid tempo that merely broadens out at the major cadences—in startling contrast to his outward and more aggressively word-based manner when conducting the motet on which it is based. Whether Palestrina intended it quite that way or not, the overwhelming impression here is how the materials for the motet were entirely transmogrified in their adaptation to a Mass cycle.
The group of more familiar motets is neatly contrasted, each one carefully turned to emphasize its individuality. Super flumina and Sicut cervus elegantly plangent, Exsultate Deo bright and joyful with the lower voices coming into their own and the wonderful eight-voice O bone Jesu gentiy prayerful. With full texts and an imaginative sleeve-note by John Milsom, this record makes one look forward eagerly to further issues from one of our major cathedral choirs under a conductor whose approach is so controlled and unostentatious.'