This is a mixed bag of mainstream mid-century American choral music, Randall Thompson—like Virgil Thomson a good Harvard man—has specialized in choral writing. His Alleluia (1940) has long been a favourite with choirs: there were 14 separate recordings up to 1980. From this performance by the Roberts Wesleyan College Chorale it is difficult to see why. They start nowhere near the ppp asked for at the beginning and have dropped a semitone by the end. Thompson's A Feast of Praise (1963) is oddly scored for seven brass instruments and harp. In the outside movements the writing is blandly cheerful, the performance needed greater rhythmic precision in both brass and voices.
Technical factors now obtrude as, listening, one becomes wearied by the unresonant acoustic and consistently close, sometimes rough, sound of the choir. There is occasional background noise too. Howard Hanson's various psalms are often prolonged by alleluias and lose from a limited dynamic range in performance and recording. Things brighten up with Roy Harris. The Civil War song When Johnny comes marching home was one of his obsessions and his free paraphrase of it is included here. But the most impressive work on this release is Harris's Symphony for Voices (1935) where there is more than a glimpse of the composer of the symphonies. This is the choir's most committed performance too, bringing the work back to the record catalogue after a long gap. (It looks as if there has been no recording, even in the USA, since the Westminster Choir, for whom Harris wrote his Symphony, recorded it in 1937.) The text is from Whitman, with whom Harris had much in common, both for the Symphony and the Three Songs of Democracy which follow.'