Our latest album, That Sweet City, featuring works by Vaughan Williams and Leighton written for Queen’s, reached number two in the specialist classical charts and featured on Gramophone Magazine’s Critics’ Choice 2024. The orchestra for the recording is the Britten Sinfonia, with tenor soloist Nick Pritchard. The Choir was delighted to have been joined by Queen’s Old Member and Honorary Fellow Rowan Atkinson (Engineering, 1975) as the narrator for An Oxford Elegy.
First, Kenneth Leighton composed his cantata Veris gratia during the final year of his undergraduate studies at Queen’s, and it was first performed in Hall by the Eglesfield Musical Society in its Trinity Term concert in 1951. This is the first recording of the piece. A year later saw the première at Queen’s of one of the last major works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy, for choir, orchestra, and narrator, setting poetry by Matthew Arnold which paints an idyllic picture of the Oxfordshire countryside and includes the famous description of Oxford as ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’. Rowan Atkinson comments on joining the choir for this recording:
“When I was as a postgraduate student at Queen’s, I wanted to join the College choir very much, but I always failed to meet the required standard. I can’t tell you how pleasing it is, 50 years later, for my voice to feature on a recording by The Queen’s College Choir…albeit having sneaked in there, if you will, via the back door.”
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