Home listening - the RIAS Kammerchor, the Cardinall’s Musick and Concentus Musicus Wien

The Guardian 0

The Berlin-based RIAS Kammerchor excel in an all-Britten programme, while Vienna’s Concentus Musicus finish what Schubert started

• St Cecilia is best known as the patron saint of music, but it may all be a mistake: the ancient accounts that link her to the art have her disdaining the act of making music and “singing to the Lord in her heart”. Still, no one is complaining if she stimulates visions as wonderful as WH Auden’s text, which Benjamin Britten (who was born on St Cecilia’s Day) set as his Hymn to St Cecilia in 1942. “Blessed Cecilia, appear in vision to all musicians/ appear and inspire”, says the text, and Britten’s vocal music refers to the violin, flute, trumpet and timpani – as did Purcell’s setting of Dryden’s A Song for St Cecilia’s Day three centuries earlier.

It’s the centrepiece of a fine new all-Britten disc from the RIAS Kammerchor under Justin Doyle (Harmonia Mundi): idiomatic readings in a quite resonant acoustic, more secure in its full-voiced choruses than in its solos. The challenging Gerard Manley Hopkins settings AMDG have not established themselves as strongly, but if Britten had composed nothing more than the perfect, touching Hymn to the Virgin he wrote when 16, he would be remembered.