I Slept & Dreamed That Life Was Beauty

In an album of world-premiere recordings, Ben Parry conducts London Voices and the English Chamber Orchestra in choral music by British composer Jonathan Rutherford. One of the first students to attend the Yehudi Menuhin School, Jonathan Rutherford went on to study with Lennox Berkeley, Harrison Birtwistle, Nadia Boulanger and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Rutherford's choral music embraces sacred and secular texts ranging from the Bible to Oscar Wilde. This release features Rutherford's setting of Psalm 13 for choir and strings, in which lamentation gives way to peace; The Artist and The Master, in which he adds musical layers to Wilde's spiritual storytelling; and the elegiac Final Parting, to words by Julie Rutherford. The release ends with the good-humoured Four Toasts, composed during Rutherford's teen years and later revised and orchestrated.