Choir of New College - Antienne Ave cuius conceptio

Ludford: Missa Benedicta et Venerabilis
This recording has been nominated for the Gramophone Awards shortlist.
This recording was released in France in February. It presents one of the most accomplished festal masses (Benedicta et venerabilis es) by the unjustly neglected Nicholas Ludford (c.1485-1557) together with two of his extended votive anthems. The recording was made in July 2007 while the Choir was on tour in France.
In his review for Classic FM, Rick Jones wrote: The long wait to hear the music of the forgotten Nicholas Ludford (1485-1557) is amply rewarded on this CD by the Choir of New College, Oxford, under Edward Higginbottom. ... A must for all lovers of choral music.
From Andrew Mellors interview with Edward Higginbottom:
AM: Your boy choristers seem wonderfully adept in the challenging features of Ludfords music

EH: It took the boys a while to inhabit the music, but soon enough you could sense them understanding it. Wed not sung the masses in chapel, only the votive anthems, so there was a sense of discovery in tackling the masses. It says something about Ludford, a composer from five hundred years ago, that his music captured the imagination of our boy choristers—even more so than much music of more recent times.

Nicholas Ludford (c. 1485c. 1557) was an English composer of the Tudor period. He is known for his festal masses, which are preserved in two early-16th-century choirbooks, the Caius Choirbook at Caius College, Cambridge, and the Lambeth Choirbook at Lambeth Palace, London, along with those of the older composer Robert Fayrfax (14621521), with whom his music is often asssociated. Ludford's composing career, which appears to have ended in 1535, is seen as bridging the gap between between the music of Fayrfax and that of John Taverner (14951545).[1] Music scholar David Skinner has called Ludford "one of the last unsung geniuses of Tudor polyphony". In his Oxford History of English Music, John Caldwell observes of Ludford's six-part Mass and Magnificat Benedicta that it "is more a matter of astonishment that such mastery should be displayed by a composer of whom virtually nothing was known until modern times".
Ludford's early career is undocumented, but his date of birth has been estimated at around 1485 on the basis of his acceptance into the Fraternity of St Nicholas, a guild of parish clerks in London, in 1521. He does not seem to have taken a university degree. Sometime after 1500, Ludford became established as a singer at St Stephen's College, Westminster, adjacent to Westminster Palace. When Henry VIII shut the college down in 1547 as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Ludford was listed as a verger. He was given a pension, which he last drew in 1556, suggesting that he died in 1557.

Dir.: Edward Higginbottom

http://www.newcollegechoir.com/discography-list.html

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• new
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• oxford
• boys
• trebles
• nicholas
• ludford
• missa
• benedicta

[Ravensbread]

Dear Denis,

This is absolutly the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. Bless you. Hope you and yours have a wonderful Christmas.

Br. John

[treblechoir99]

@Ravensbread Merry Christmas Br John and thank you for your faithfullness.

[jimjamjolly]

lol, u can hear hugh's voice the most

[sfkcbf]

So much fine music from 15th-18th centuries sadly has been neglected. I am pleased with the efforts being made to share this beauty with us.