It is probably not too much to say that the distinctively modern style of choral singing was created at Cambridge during these years. Cathedral singing was then still too often heavy and syllabic, with the lay-clerk tone grindingly insensitive to blend and nuance. King’s brought light and grace. It was singing guided by intelligence: their psalms alone were a revelation. A generation of choral scholars went out from Cambridge at that time and, along with others who heard the choir either in the Chapel or on the radio, brought the style to other choirs; the sensitive play of light-and-shade and the flexible way with words which we now find in recordings of choirs throughout the land owes most to this famous choir and to the man who directed it in those years.
A photograph of Boris Ord is reproduced in the leaflet, showing him with a brightly striped blazer buttoned tight across his homely middle, and with a jolly smile for the camera. That is not how I remember him at all. An irascible man, with an alarming presence, a terror to the ladies in the Musical Society choir (“Contraltos, you have about as much vitality as a slug in the bottom of the Cam”), he moved with ominous authority in procession, and in unaccompanied services exhaled a chain-smoker’s bass, pumping with his left hand to control the tempo and glowering horribly in the candlelight. Under him the choir was its most fully, excitingly characteristic self. These early records catch it in (say) the sublime quietness of the “Dona nobis pacem” of Byrd’s four-part Agnus Dei, or in the Gloria of Howells’s Magnificat. Several of them show how fine was the sustained growth of crescendo, or the slight but decisive quickening of impulse. There was refinement but also drama and colour (hear the contrasts in Factum est silentium or the sudden forte of “He hath shown strength” in Howells). It is interesting too to hear the technical improvement of the recordings year by year, starting with the “oppressively humid day in July 1949” when Andrew Parker’s note tells us, “the choir was to learn for the first time the joy of singing of snow and cold winter in entirely the wrong season”.'