VOCES8 Foundation Choir & Orchestra: Rose Ever Blooming
VOCES8 Records

Many a VOCES8 recording is available, but there are also ones featuring the London-based company's full Foundation Choir & Orchestra. Issued in 2022, their debut album presented Swedish composer Mårten Jansson's Requiem Novum, and a year later they released A Choral Christmas and in 2024 the sparkling collection To Sing of Love. With the vocal group's founder and Artistic Director Barnaby Smith conducting, the choir, orchestra, and violin soloist Jack Liebeck now deliver Rose Ever Blooming, a Christmas oratorio co-composed by Jocelyn Hagen and Timothy C. Takach. Presented in fourteen parts, the fifty-five-minute work is a Christmas-themed piece that recounts the story of Mary and her role in the story of Jesus and accentuates the bond between mother and son and by extension the importance of family. Rose Ever Blooming is Hagen and Takach's first full-length collaborative album, and their efforts are honoured by the dedicated reading the vocal and instrumental forces have brought to this work of exceptional dignity and refinement.

The libretto the composers crafted for the oratorio derives from the poetry of Patricia Monaghan and weaves a dozen of her texts with three traditional Christmas carols, a move that imbues the work with warmth and familiarity whenever that material arises. The two acknowledge that they were drawn to the story because both are parents and sensitive to the everyday miracle that is childbirth; further to that, Monaghan's poetry honours parenthood in its various manifestations, and that too naturally resonated with the collaborators. In Rose Ever Blooming, Mary's story is, in their words, “presented as a reflection from the end of her life, beginning with the “Annunciation” and ending with her own list of “Beatitudes”—praising the ordinary and the everyday blessings we take for granted.” The music separately composed by Hagen and Cantus co-founder Takach has been recognized for its melodic allure and textural richness, qualities in ample supply on this collaboration. That the composition they've created is so uplifting—consider the long list of blessings in “Beatitudes”—only bolsters its appeal.

Of course Rose Ever Blooming isn't a VOCES8 recording in the strict sense as its vocal resources number beyond the group's eight. It is a VOCES8 recording in another sense, however, in that most of its members are part of the twenty-eight singers performing the work. One-time VOCES8 soprano Andrea Haines appears alongside current soprano Eleonora Poignant, tenors Blake Morgan, Euan Williamson, and Monty Charles (as of this writing subbing for Morgan, who's on sabbatical), baritone Christopher Moore, and bass Dominic Carver. Alto Katie Jeffries-Harris sings with the ensemble but is also a featured soloist on two parts, while Smith, normally contributing alto, here conducts exclusively. Those familiar with the VOCES8 singers' voices will no doubt recognize them occasionally from within the Foundation Choir.

The work's introduced with an elegiac instrumental, “Lo, How a Rose,” that beautifully sets the tone and augments the orchestra's lustrous textures with Liebeck's tremulous violin. As it should, the intro allows listeners to enter into the work's realm and take their place within it before the story formally begins. The magic arrives quickly thereafter when the stirring “The Beginning of the Story” couples the choir's gently soaring voices with harp, strings, and woodwinds. “Annunciation: With a Sound Like Wings” is distinguished by the pairing of a soloing Liebeck with the choir, “Gabriel's Message” by the celebratory glory of the angel's visit with Mary, and “Miracles” for its luminous expression of gratitude for domestic pleasures and the gift of new life (“The baby is healthy and smiles like stars”). “Resurrection,” which segues from sadness over the cutting down of an almond tree to optimism when “buds opened into sprays of white,” and the inspirational “I Said Yes to Hope” are rendered all the more memorable by Jeffries-Harris's resplendent turns.

January 2026