Reviewed by Lins Honeyman

Where to begin? Here we have a 20,000 word illustrated book and more than two and a half hours of superlative examples of choral music. Author David Hansell writes with a light touch and is well aware that what he is trying to do is almost impossible: however many composers he includes he will inevitably leave someone out and when it comes to selecting which music to use he cannot possibly please all of us all of the time. And yet he makes a pretty good fist of it. CD 1 is entirely religious in nature, which reflects the fact that the Church had a near monopoly on written choral music for hundreds of years. We open with our old friend "Anon" in the form of a Gregorian Chant and move through all the big names of the Middle Ages, including Joaquin des Prez, John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, and many others until we reach Johann Sebastian Bach. In all we get 23 pieces or generous extracts by 14 composers (all dead white European males). Jeremy Summerly's Oxford Camerata serve as the Naxos house band on nine tracks and we also get a guest appearance by John Rutter's Cambridge Singers in Taverner's "Christe Jesu, Pastor Bone". CD 2 is just as good but not quite as Christian. We open with Handel, followed by Mozart, Haydn and on through the great and the good of European choral composition until we close with the only living composer in the collection, Arvo Part. I think we need a third CD to show us some of the new trajectories being taken by contemporary composers but this is a minor quibble over what is an outstanding introduction to choral music at a very generous price.

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