Like To the Lark

Jennifer Pike (violin), Maria Forsström (mezzo-soprano) & The Swedish Chamber Choir, Simon Phipps

The Swedish Chamber Choir makes its debut on Chandos with this fascinating programme of works for choir, choir and solo voice, and for choir and violin. The founder and conductor, Simon Phipps, leads the choir in unaccompanied works by Swedish and British composers. Maria Forsström joins them in one of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, in a sixteen-part arrangement by Clytus Gottwald, and in Judith Bingham’s The Drowned Lovers, a stark companion piece to Stanford’s The Blue Bird. The violinist Jennifer Pike joins the Choir in Ola Gjeilo’s stunning Serenity (a setting of O magnum mysterium) and Paul Drayton’s outstanding 2018 arrangement of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, for violin and chamber choir. Recorded in Surround Sound.

Alfvén:
 Limu, limu, limu, Som stjarnan uppa himmelen 
 Uti vår hage (Text: Folk-song from Gotland)

Bingham, J:
 The Drowned Lovers

Gjeilo:
 Serenity

Mahler:
 Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (Rückert-Lieder)

Stanford:
 The Blue Bird, Op. 119 No. 3

Stenhammar:
 Tre körvisor (Three Choral Ballads)

Vaughan Williams:
 Full fathom five
 Over hill, over dale
 Rest
 The Lark Ascending
 Three Shakespeare Songs

Wikander:
 Kung Liljekonvalje (text: Gustav Fröding)

"Listening to Simon Philipps’s immaculately accomplished Swedish Chamber Choir is rather like sinking gently into a warm bath bubbling over with your favourite scented lotions…This album combin[es] refreshing repertoire with refined choral bliss."
BBC Music Magazine - February 2020 ****

"This is a highly attractive and innovative programme of a cappella choral music which also makes use of solo instruments. The Swedish Chamber Choir, a beautifully honed sound with a versatile tessitura (and excellent English!), are directed by Simon Phipps, who brings a sympathetic set of interpretations to much of this inwardly melancholy repertoire."
Gramophone Magazine - February 2020