A wise man said you should not swim in the same river twice, and somebody is bound to add that it wouldn’t be the same river anyway. “Agnus Dei I” (Erato, 1/97) was a winner. The camel’s prospects with regard to the needle’s eye are rosy compared to the likelihood of a genuinely good choral record getting into the charts; but this one made it. Now comes “Agnus Dei II”, with a similar programme and, no doubt, hopes for a comparable success. On the first record it was Barber’s Adagio for strings, in the composer’s own arrangement as a choral setting for the Agnus Dei, that won so many hearers and hearts; this time it will presumably be the famous Adagio ascribed to Tomaso Albinoni courtesy of Remo Giazotti and set here by John Cameron to a text, in Latin, from the New Testament. But for the risk of mispronunciation on the airwaves, the new collection might possibly have been called “Beati”, as that is the recurrent word and has ‘beat’ in it which would have helped it on its way to the charts. It has practically everything else too: a long line of sad, stately melody, a softly plucked bass, and, with the addition of voices, a sonority and emotional charge that enrich the silver and gold of baroque piety with the scarlet of Italian opera.
The disc’s subtitle is “music to soothe the soul”, which tends to prefer the sweet melancholy of a nostalgic adagio to the brisk allegro of a bracing Brandenburg, even though this would be much better for it. It could be that Dr Higginbottom and his choir were aware of this and took preventative action. The programme certainly has its quota of soothers, but they are taken at rather faster speeds than usual. Lotti’s Crucifixus, Schubert’s 23rd Psalm and Martin’s Agnus Dei from the Mass for Double Choir are examples, and all of them benefit, especially in this context. The choir itself has long been one of the best in its normal repertoire of church music, and I do believe that these excursions (including the recent folk-song record; Erato, 3/98) have emboldened it in coloration and expressive scope. Purcell’s Hear my prayer, for instance, is sung with exceptional intensity. Some of the arrangements may be questionable. Albinoni is fair game, but Brahms’s lovely Op. 30 forfeits the spiritual quietness of church when deprived of its organ accompaniment, and Schubert is not really in need of strings and harp. It remains a delightful record, and not to be dismissed by ‘serious’ musicians on account of its wider appeal. The real danger of swimming in the same river twice is of course that everybody who cheered you on first time will take not a blind bit of notice the second: it would be a pity if that happened here.'