Gramophone Awards
2024
Shortlisted - Choral

Presto Recordings of the Year
Finalist 2023

Presto Recording of the Week
24th November 2023

Roderick Williams (baritone), Bergen Philharmonic, Sir Mark Elder

Roderick Williams heads up the cast for this new recording of Delius' A Mass of Life with the Bergen Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Mark Elder. Accompanied by soloists Gemma Summerfield, Claudia Huckle and Bror Magnus T?denes, the Bergen Philharmonic Choir and Edvard Grieg Kor join Collegium Musicum Choir to complete the tour de force needed to perform and record this monumental work.

Born Fritz Delius to German parents in Bradford, England, any links to that country are offset by his various attachments to America, France, Germany and of course Norway.

Norway?its people, landscape, language and literature?never loosened its grip on Delius's imagination so Norwegian label Lawo Classics is the perfect partner to be able to bring this new recording to life.

The extent to which Norway's natural environment fired Delius's musical imagination is evident in A Song of the 5 High Hills, for orchestra and wordless chorus, and in his love letter to Norway's cool, clean air and majestic scenery, the orchestral tone poem Eventyr. A Mass of Life also owes its existence to Norway.

Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, a Norwegian national orchestra, dates back to 1765. Edvard Grieg served as its artistic director from 1880 to 1882. Edward Gardner is Chief Conductor and Sir Mark Elder is the orchestra's Principal Guest Conductor.

The Orchestra was nominated Orchestra of the Year 2020 by Gramophone and won two Gramophone Classical Music Awards in 2021: Recording of the Year and Opera Award Winner for Britten's Peter Grimes.

Roderick Williams needs no introduction as one of the most sought-after baritones of his generation who enjoys relationships with all the major UK and European opera houses.

"This superb new set from Bergen makes the strongest case for the piece imaginable, thanks to the irreproachable singing of the Edvard Grieg Kor and Collegium Musicum Choir (who deliver accuracy and athleticism in spades), Roderick Williams’s warmly sympathetic Zarathustra, and above all Elder’s masterly grasp on the architecture and detail of a score which can so easily seem sprawling and overblown." - Presto Music, 24th November 2023