Sir Stephen John Cleobury was an English organist and music director. He worked with the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, where he served as music director from 1982 to 2019, and with the BBC Singers.
Masaaki Suzuki is a Japanese organist, harpsichordist, conductor, and the founder and music director of the Bach Collegium Japan. With this ensemble he is recording the complete choral works of Johann Sebastian Bach for the Swedish label BIS Records, for which he is also recording Bach's concertos, orchestral suites, and solo works for harpsichord and organ. He is also an artist-in-residence at Yale University and the principal guest conductor of its Schola Cantorum, and has conducted orchestras and choruses around the world.
Sir Richard Runciman Terry was an English organist, choir director, composer and musicologist. He is noted for his pioneering revival of Tudor liturgical music.
Peter Philips was an eminent English composer, organist, and Catholic priest exiled to Flanders. He was one of the greatest keyboard virtuosos of his time, and transcribed or arranged several Italian motets and madrigals by such composers as Lassus, Palestrina, and Giulio Caccini for his instruments. Some of his keyboard works are found in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Philips also wrote many sacred choral works.
Igor Stravinsky composed his Mass between 1944 and 1948. This 19-minute setting of the Roman Catholic Mass exhibits the austere, Neoclassic, anti-Romantic aesthetic that characterizes his work from about 1923 to 1951. The Mass also represents one of only a handful of extant pieces by Stravinsky that was not commissioned. Part of the motivation behind its composition has been cited by Robert Craft and others as the product of a spiritual necessity, as Stravinsky intended the work to be used functionally.
Richard Dering — also Deering, Dearing, Diringus, etc. — was an English Renaissance composer during the era of late Tudor music. He is noted for his pioneering use of compositional techniques which anticipated the advent of Baroque music in England. Some of his surviving choral works are part of the repertoire of Anglican church music today.
Andrew Carwood is the Director of Music at St Paul's Cathedral in London and director of his own group, The Cardinall's Musick.
James Anthony O'Donnell is a British organist, choral conductor and academic teacher who has been a professor of organ at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in Connecticut, United States, since 2023.
The Choir of St John's College, Cambridge is part of the English cathedral tradition, having been founded to sing the daily liturgy in the College Chapel, though it is set apart from other English choirs of this tradition by the frequent inclusion of Continental works in its repertoire and its emphasis on polyphonic interpretations. Alongside the choir of King's College, Cambridge, it is one of the two most famous collegiate choirs in Cambridge, having had over 90 recordings published.
Stephen David Layton is an English conductor.
Saint Peter's Singers (SPS) is a chamber choir associated with Leeds Minster, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England that celebrated during the Season 2017/2018 the fortieth anniversary of the choir's formation by Harry Fearnley in 1977. An anniversary concert took place at Leeds Minster on Sunday 25 June 2017 with the National Festival Orchestra and soloists Kristina James, Joanna Gamble, Paul Dutton and Quentin Brown. Further anniversary year events included Bach Cantatas and Music for Christmas at Fulneck Church in August and December respectively, Handel Coronation Anthems at Holy Trinity, Boar Lane as part of the Leeds Handel Festival in September and a tour of East Anglia in October. In November at Leeds Town Hall, the Singers participated in Herbert Howells's masterpiece Hymnus Paradisi with Leeds Philharmonic Chorus and Leeds College of Music Chorale under the direction of Dr David Hill with the Orchestra of Opera North. 2018 began with a concert of Sacred Choral Masterworks at Leeds Town Hall in February and Bach's Mass in B minor at Leeds Minster on Good Friday 2018 in memory of long-serving member Jan Holdstock. The final concert of the current season takes place at Leeds Minster on Sunday 24 June at Leeds Minster at 5.30. At this event will be presented the first performance of a new work from composer Philip Moore commissioned for the Singers' 40th anniversary – the motet Tu es Petrus – along with music by E W Naylor, Arvo Part, Sir Hubert Parry, Judith Bingham and Maurice Durufle.
Alamire is an English vocal consort specialising in medieval and Renaissance music, both secular and religious. It was founded by David Skinner in 2005, and very swiftly won praise for the quality and imagination of its recordings. "The performances fairly glow, and so does one's spirit after traversing this glorious programme."
David Skinner is a British musicologist and choir director. He works at the University of Cambridge, where he is the director of music at Sidney Sussex College and is an affiliated lecturer, teaching historical and practical topics from the medieval and Renaissance periods. He is the founder of the vocal consort Alamire, and the cofounder of the vocal ensembles Magdala and The Cardinall's Musick. He has produced more than 25 recordings. He has been associated with a number of award-winning projects.
Cecilia McDowall is a British composer, particularly known for her choral compositions.
Cantiones sacrae, Op. 4, is a collection of forty pieces of vocal sacred music on Latin texts, composed by Heinrich Schütz and first published in 1625. The pieces have individual numbers 53 to 93 in the Schütz-Werke-Verzeichnis (SWV), the catalogue of his works. The general title Cantiones sacrae was common at the time and was used by many composers, including Palestrina, Byrd and Tallis and Hans Leo Hassler (1591).
Ēriks Ešenvalds is a Latvian composer, mainly of choral music. From 2011 to 2013 he was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.
Songs of Farewell is a set of six choral motets by the British composer Hubert Parry. The pieces were composed between 1916 and 1918 and were among his last compositions before his death.
Chandos Anthems, HWV 246–256, is the common name of a set of anthems written by George Frideric Handel. These sacred choral compositions number eleven; a twelfth of disputed authorship is not considered here. The texts are psalms and combined psalm verses in English. Handel wrote the anthems as composer in residence at Cannons, the court of James Brydges, who became the First Duke of Chandos in 1719. His chapel was not yet finished, and services were therefore held at St Lawrence in Whitchurch. The scoring is intimate, in keeping with the possibilities there. Some of the anthems rely on earlier works, and some were later revised for other purposes.
Dixit Maria is a motet for four voices by Hans Leo Hassler. It is part of his collection Cantiones sacrae published in 1591. It sets a verse from the narration of the annunciation in Latin. Hassler based a mass on the motet, Missa super Dixit Maria.
Anna Markland is a British pianist who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 1982, playing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto and subsequently pursued a dual performing career as pianist and soprano.
