Gramophone Magazine
September 2020
Editor's Choice

Choir of St John's College Cambridge, Andrew Nethsingha

Finnissy: Dum transisset Sabbatum
Finnissy: Dum transisset Sabbatum – double
Finnissy: Videte miraculum
Finnissy: Videte miraculum – double
Finnissy: Commentary on ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’
Finnissy: Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn
Finnissy: Commentary on BWV 562
Finnissy: Plebs angelica
Finnissy: Plebs angelica – alternativo

Michael Finnissy was born in Tulse Hill in 1946. He studied at the Royal College of Music with Bernard Stevens and Humphrey Seale, and in Italy with Roman Vlad. Much of his early work was first performed in France and the Netherlands, while he was working as a freelance repetiteur and pianist for dance-classes. He taught at the Royal Academy of Music, at the universities of Sussex and Southampton, and at the Katholiek Universiteit in Leuven. He has also given summer courses at Dartington, and been resident artist at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne (Australia). He has been featured composer at the Huddersfield Festival several times, at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and many other places across the world, most recently at SICPP in Boston USA. In this new recording the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge perform Finnissy’s deep, rich and fulfilling music – created as part of a residency, which combines evocative works directly inspired by Tudor Music from the choir's library with more free-form inspirations of this material by the composer. It has taken Conductor and Director Andrew Nethsingha four years to gradually learn the pieces on this recording. He says it “has been a deeply enriching experience which I want others to share”.

"It’s great, in the first place, for an institution of this type to have approached a composer whose demands were always likely to challenge it. The Choir of St John’s College rise to those challenges gamely, their advocacy naturally essential to the success of the project. And it is a success. The Taverner parody and its organ double seem to me especially fine, both as compositions and performances." - Gramophone Magazine, September 2020.