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New College Among World's Top 20 Choirs
New College Choir has been acclaimed as one of the world's top 20 choirs by an international jury, Gramophone magazine has announced in its latest edition.
New College Choir, directed by Professor Edward Higginbottom, comes in at No. 14, one of just three Oxbridge chapel choirs in the league table. Top place goes to the Monteverdi Choir. A number of other choirs with strong Oxford connections are also represented in the list, including I Fagiolini (founded in Oxford when its director, Robert Hollingworth, was reading Music here), the Tallis Shcolars (founded and directed by Peter Phillips, former Oxford choral scholar and now director of the chapel choir at Merton College) and The Cardinall's Musick (founded by Andrew Carwood during his time singing with Christ Church Cathedral Choir).
The full list can be found in the January 2011 edition of Gramophone.
To accompany the jury's verdict, the celebrated American choral composer Eric Whitacre reflects on why British ensembles dominate the list. 'At the age of 18', he writes, 'when I first began singing in choirs, I devoured every choral recording I could find. I collected a huge and varied number of choral discs but over time realised that I was partial to those albums performed by British choirs.' Three recordings stand out in his memory, the first of which is Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy, recorded by Stephen Darlington conducting Christ Church Cathedral Choir. 'I loved these recordings', writes Whitacre, 'and marvelled at such perfect singing.'