The Choir of King’s College Cambridge is arguably the world’s most famous choral group. This new album is a tour of the ecclesiastical year from Advent through to Ascension. The paired ancient and modern settings represented on the album showcase the vast range of music that the choir performs each season reflecting Christ’s birth, death and resurrection through the festivals of Advent, Christmas, Candlemas, Lent, Easter and Ascension. The rest of the year, known as Ordinary time, is focused more on Christ’s ministry on earth.

A Year at King’s includes such favourites as Allegri’s Miserere and Barber’s Agnus Dei, an arrangement of his famous Adagio for Strings, as well as the first recording of Tavener’s Away in a Manger, written for King’s College Choir’s 2004 ‘Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols’. The rest of the programme comprises works composed between the 15th and 20th centuries by Palestrina, Pärt and Poulenc, Lassus, Holst, Guerrero, Eccard, Peter Philips and Stanford. The disc is rounded off with a spectacular performance of Tallis’s Spem in alium. On this, as on many previous King’s College Choir recordings, the conductor is Stephen Cleobury, organist and Director of Music at King’s since 1982.

King Henry VI founded King’s College in 1441. Six centuries later, these daily services in the magnificent chapel that is one of the jewels of Britain’s cultural and architectural heritage are the raison d’être for, and a central part in, the lives of the Choir’s 16 choristers, 14 choral scholars and two organ scholars.

The international reputation of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge was established by the radio broadcast worldwide of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols each Christmas Eve, heard currently by an audience estimated in the tens of millions, and has been consolidated by regular international tours and by the critical and commercial success of its EMI Classics releases.