Stephen Darlington tells Nicola Lisle about Christ Church Cathedral Choir’s new CD, due for release next month

For the past few years, Christ Church Cathedral Choir has been on what musical director Stephen Darlington calls a “voyage of discovery” by recording long-forgotten music from the Eton Choirbook.

This magnificent tome, containing around 90 settings of texts about the Virgin Mary, was used by choristers at Eton College Chapel during the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

So far the choir has released three volumes of music from the Choirbook, all of which were nominated for Gramophone awards in the Early Music category.

A fourth volume, The Sun Most Radiant, is due for release on 9th September and focuses on three composers – John Browne, William Horwood and William Stratford. As with the previous volumes, this latest CD includes premiere recordings.

The original Eton Choirbook is in Eton College library, but Stephen proudly shows me a facsimile in his office.

“The actual book is about four times the size of this one,” he says. “The boys used to stand near the front of it, and you can see from the facsimile that the script is very clear. The adults used to stand behind. So everybody stood around the book so that they could all read it.”

Stephen’s interest in the Eton Choirbook was stirred when he heard the Stabat Mater by John Browne.

“I thought, this is wonderful music, maybe it would be good to try doing it with this choir. It was also the challenge of doing this music with boys.

“Clearly at the end of the 15th century it was performed by boys, but I think the assumption in recent years was that it was too far out of the comfort zone for children to be able to do. But we do music by Taverner, who was the first director of music at Christ Church in the 1520s, and this is not long before that.

“I think we are the only all-male choir that’s recorded this amount of music from the Eton Choirbook. There may be one or two recordings of the Browne Stabat Mater, but there’s no other male choir that’s tackled it on this scale.”

So what, for Stephen, is the appeal of this music? “I always imagined that this period of music all sounded the same, so the real revelation for me has been that all these different composers have got different musical voices. The generic style is roughly the same, but the individual voices are very striking.

“Some of the composers write in a very harmonic way with a really strong sense of texture, so you get these wonderful passages where you have very widely spread chords, and then occasionally you get one particular part divided into two to add to the sonority.

“Then there are others who are fairly obsessed with intricate ornamentation and perhaps a slightly stronger sense of the linear approach.

“And of course it’s based on Plainsong foundation, so somewhere or other buried within the texture there’s always this Plainsong theme.”

With the fourth volume due out in two weeks’ time, Stephen is already thinking ahead to the next volume. “I’ve got a long list for a fifth volume and I’m quite hopeful we’ll do that in the coming year.

“We have other projects as well, but this one is particularly appealing because it is striking new ground.”

Christ Church Cathedral Choir - The Sun Most Radiant: Music from the Eton Choirbook Vol. 4

Avie, September 9

Also due for release on the Coro label in November is Durante’s Requiem in C minor, recorded with The Sixteen and Oxford Baroque.

chchchoir.org