After a few albums that stretched the ensemble towards contemporary, crossover, and popular repertoire (including an all-Disney program), The King’s Singers, prolific recording artists at any rate, present a new album that can be characterized as a return to standard repertoire. “’Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On’ is an exploration of European choral music from the early 20th century (and a bit either side), much of it shaped and scarred by the spectre of conflicts that dominated the continent in that period,” say The King’s Singers. “For us, the album has been a chance to develop and exercise new and different colors in our singing, to dive deeply into text-centric interpretations and historical context, to savor and cherish the four languages in which we sing here, and – in one instance – even to expand our forces a little.”
The program features arrangements of songs by Schubert, Brahms, and Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn; settings of English poetry by Elgar and Vaughan Williams; French chansons by Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Ravel; little-known works by the “Swedish Vaughan Williams,” Hugo Alfvén; and Sibelius’s anthem Finlandia (sung in English). Sopranos Grace Davidson and Victoria Meteryard join the gentlemen for Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs. This is the last recording The King’s Singers made before the departure of the charismatic bass Jonathan Howard. Piers Connor Kennedy began his tenure as the new ensemble bass in January.
