Rutherford: The Wilderness & The Solitary Place London Voices, Ben Parry, William Saunders

The Wilderness and the Solitary Place is an album of world-premiere recordings in which Ben Parry conducts London Voices and organist William Saunders in choral music by British composer Jonathan Rutherford. Following the release of I Slept and Dreamed that Life Was Beauty, these exceptional musicians reunite to perform Rutherford’s sensitive settings of sacred and secular texts. Three Advent carols inspired by Isaiah include one translated into verse by Jennifer Thorn and another derived from the medieval Coventry Mystery Play. From Rutherford’s opera, The Star-Child, based on two Oscar Wilde stories, we hear his Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis and Pilgrim’s Song – in turn based on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Rejoice! Rejoice! is a Christmas anthem inspired by Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester, and In the Bleak Midwinter is a new setting of Christina Rossetti’s timeless poetry. The recording culminates in Rutherford’s meditative and profoundly beautiful Good Friday Music (Seven Last Words). Jonathan Rutherford was one of the first students to attend the Yehudi Menuhin School, and went on to study with Lennox Berkeley, Harrison Birtwistle, Nadia Boulanger and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.