'That Sweet City' album release: Professor Owen Rees and Choir of the Queen's College
This Friday, 25 October, sees the release of a new album by Professor Owen Rees and the choir of The Queen's College, That Sweet City, which features two major works written for Queen's in the 1950s: Kennth 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 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'. The Choir was delighted to have been joined by Queen's alumnus Rowan Atkinson (Engineering, 1975) as the narrator for An Oxford Elegy. He states:
'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, fifty 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.'
The orchestra for the recording is the Britten Sinfonia, well known for their interpretations of 20th-century British repertoire.
The album is available at https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/9660161--that-sweet-city
