Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge - Child: Sacred Choral Music (1998)

The Choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, is one of Britain's most active and versatile collegiate choral groups. The choir performs often, tours widely, and has recorded a large catalog of albums. It has also spawned successful offshoots: the Gonville Girls, the Caius Men (both featuring a cappella pop and jazz vocal arrangements), and the small vocal-instrumental Caius Consort. Comprising 24 singers (young adults, mixed genders) and two organists, the Choir of Gonville and Caius College traces its origins to the late 19th century, when the composer Henry Wood was its first director -- or, to use the choir's own terminology, Precentor. The current Precentor is Geoffrey Webber, a musicologist specializing in Dietrich Buxtehude and one of the figures responsible for enlarging the choir's repertory far beyond the usual a cappella Renaissance choral music and Romantic and contemporary compositions of similar texture. A glance at the choir's recordings reveals composers as diverse as Joseph Rheinberger, Leonardo Leo, and Judith Weir, as well as plainchant and collections of choral music from Switzerland and Brazil. The choir sings five times a week, including at three chapel services and at six annual College Feasts, at Gonville and Caius College. They mount tours of Britain and beyond several times a year, and have performed as far afield as Bogotá, Colombia and Hong Kong. Their recordings and performances have both explored forgotten repertories from the musical past and championed contemporary composers such as Weir, Robin Holloway, and Cheryl Frances-Hoad. The choir began recording for the ASV label in 1995 with the rare Puccini Requiem mass and Janáček's Mass in E flat major. The group has also recorded extensively for the Delphian label, releasing up to three albums annually in the 2010s. The Choir of Gonville and Caius College issued an album of choral music by Julian Anderson on Delphian in 2018. ~ James Manheim
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As director of the Gonville & Caius College Chorus at Cambridge University, Geoffrey Webber has built the group into a major force on the British collegiate choral scene and has led a long series of recordings. Webber is also a noted educator, having long served as Director of Music, or Precentor, at Gonville & Caius; his directorship of the choir is one of his duties in the position. Webber has also written extensively on music in the 17th century.

Webber attended New College at Oxford as an organ scholar (a student who receives financial support in the form of work as an organist), studying with Nicholas Danby and Gillian Weir and remaining at the school for master's and doctoral degrees. Webber worked at Magdalene College, Oxford, as Assisting Organist and held various other performing and teaching posts during his student career. His doctoral thesis dealt with the organ music of Dietrich Buxtehude. Between 1986 and 1989, he was director of the Edington Festival of Music within the Liturgy in Wiltshire, as well as Acting Organist at Magdalene College and New College, Oxford, before moving to Gonville & Caius in 1989. He assumed the directorship of the choir and has consistently broadened its activities, adding recordings, tours, and broadcasts to its regular functions of service music at the college. Webber established and has served as course director and examiner for a new master's degree in choral studies. Notable among his performances, broadcasts, and recordings is the breadth of choral repertory he has cultivated; in addition to the mainstream of British a cappella classics, he has programmed continental music of various periods including that of such composers as Rodion Shchedrin and Josef Rheinberger (both rare in British collegiate choir repertories), American music, and even, on the 2015 album Romaria, choral music from Brazil. The choir's catalog of recordings under Webber's direction has been large, appearing mostly on the ASV and Delphian labels; the latter firm released the album Cantique de Noël in 2018. Webber is the author of North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (1996) and of a Royal College of Organists website devoted to the music of Buxtehude, as well as the editor of several volumes of choral and organ music, and he is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Organ.