The Choir of Clare College Cambridge, Timothy Brown
The 27-year-old British composer Tarik O’Regan won the vocal category at last year’s British Composer Awards and, listening to this disc of his choral music, one can hear why. In a largely tonal, or at least modal language, he breathes new life into the motet idiom, adding the agitating voice of a cello among the plainsong variations of his Magnificat and Nunc dimittis settings, for example. The most substantial work is Dorchester Canticles, with an inventive accompaniment of harp, percussion and organ underlying vocal settings of psalm texts that are both sensitive and pungent in their expressive range. The disc spirals to its end in the purely instrumental Colimacon for organ, which organist James McVinnie despatches with great vitality. The singing from the mixed-voice Clare College Choir is beautifully fresh and refined, too. Collegium’s founder, John Rutter, is credited as producer and engineer, and the recording captures the performers in suitably spacious but not over-resonant acoustics.
Matthew Rye, The Telegraph (London)
One of the most original and eloquent of young British composers, Tarik O’Regan has already produced enough works to merit this polished disc from the choir of Clare College, Cambridge, directed by Timothy Brown. The tonal but cutting-edge quality which distinguishes his work is at its most elegant in the haunting Magnificat, at its most distinctive in the spikier Dorchester Canticles. Other works, including three motets and six settings for mixed and upper voices, mark out O’Regan’s as a vivid imagination of which we will hear much more.Andrew Holden, The Observer
The composer Tarik O’Regan is a significant new British voice, who deserves to be heard far and wide. His music communicates through the well-explored channels of warm, chordal sonority, but, crucially, neglects neither rhythmic vitality nor polyphonic weave. Consequently, there’s a real rigour to his music, and when it is performed with as much commitment as it is here, it is a transporting experience. Care Charminge Sleepe is one of the best pieces of English choral music I’ve heard in ages and is here given a heart-wrenching performance. The Dorchester Canticles, written to partner Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, is marvellous, ebullient stuff. There is an urgent immediacy to their sound, as there is to the recording quality. Tim Brown has pulled this choir up by its bootstraps over two and a half decades. Just now, Clare College choir burns perhaps brightest of all in Cambridge’s well-stocked choral firmament
William Whitehead, BBC Music Magazine