Chorus vel Organa - Music from the Lost Palace of Westminster – review

The Guardian 80

Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge/Webber,
Magnus Williamson (organ)
(Delphian)

Hidden beneath the gothic revival Houses of Parliament is the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, much restored, the only remains of the medieval collegiate chapel of St Stephen, a lost royal foundation. The resourceful Geoffrey Webber has pieced together a sequence of music from its final years under Henry VIII, based around the music of Nicholas Ludford’s Lady Mass cycle. His Gonville & Caius choir is less suavely balanced than some, but sounds invigoratingly individual, especially in Cornysh’s riveting Magnificat and Sheppard’s Sancte Dei pretiose. Magnus Williamson’s improvised chamber organ responses and interludes, based on surviving partbooks, add to the atmospheric archaeology of an extremely worthwhile compilation.