*** 140g BioVinyl LP ***

An LP transfer for one of the best-selling items in the Brilliant Classics catalogue, pressed on audiophile-grade 140-gram ‘biovinyl’.

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, is synonymous worldwide with Christmas, thanks to the annual broadcasts of its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. The service took form in Truro Cathedral in 1880, and spread across the Anglican communion before the Dean of King’s introduced it to the College in 1918, and the BBC began to broadcast it from there in 1929.

On this compilation, as at the familiar liturgy, the sequence of carols opens with a boy treble singing the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City. This particular recording has a further historical significance, in that the solo was sung (in 1994) by Guy Johnston, who has since become a renowned cellist.

This generous 66-minute sequence features carols old and new, familiar and less-well known, from The First Nowell and O Little Town of Bethlehem to modern classics such as John Tavener’s The Lamb and Judith Weir’s Illuminare Jerusalem, both of which were commissioned by King’s for the annual service, but are now sung worldwide at Christmas time.

The sequence is rounded off, like the service, with O Come, all ye faithful, featuring the celebrated descant and last-verse harmonisation by Stephen Cleobury’s predecessor as Music Director at King’s, Sir David Willcocks. The LP is manufactured at the Optimal Media plant in Hamburg, Europe’s leading pressing plant for high-grade records, and pressed on 140-gram ‘biovinyl’.

This new substitute for the standard petroleum-derived raw material for LPs is made from recycled cooking oil and waste gases, making this record an ideal present for the environmentally conscious music-lover in your life.

Recorded in 1994