Laurence John is organ scholar of The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he is reading for a music degree at the university.
On a weekly basis, he accompanies the chapel choir of The Queen’s College, described by Classic FM as ‘one of the world’s most renowned choirs’. Most recently, Laurence played for Eucharist with the choir at Westminster Abbey and earlier this year travelled with them on a tour to America, where he accompanied services and concerts in many major cathedrals and churches, including Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.
Prior to taking up his Oxford scholarship, he was organ scholar at Hereford Cathedral. As well as accompanying the cathedral choir for services, many of which were webcast, he also assisted with the training of the choristers. In October 2016, he travelled with the choir to America on a two-week tour, and later in the year to The Guards’ Chapel, London, for the annual Advent Carol Service.
Whilst a student at Hereford Cathedral School, Laurence had the opportunity to work as an organist, pianist and harpsichordist with a number of the country’s leading orchestras, including for a performance as the soloist in Saint-Saëns’ ‘Organ’ Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He accompanied school choirs for several cathedral Evensongs, as well as on a tour to Belgium in November 2014 as part of a festival commemorating the First World War, where the choir was representing Great Britain.
He was the piano accompanist to the school’s internationally acclaimed Cantabile Girls’ Choir and played for winning performances by the choir in the final of Songs of Praise School Choir of the Year competition and at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen; broadcast on BBC One and S4C respectively.
Laurence is a prize-winning Associate of the Royal College of Organists. Having previously learnt the organ with Robert Lucas (Ross), Peter Dyke (Hereford Cathedral) and Henry Fairs (Birmingham Conservatoire), he now studies with Stephen Farr.
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The juxtaposition of old and new which lies at the heart of much Christmas music lends this recording by the mixed-voice Choir of The Queen’s College Oxford its theme. The repertoire ranges in period from Hildegard of Bingen to pieces composed during the last few years. The central work – Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols – vividly encapsulates the intersection of ancient and modern, setting medieval and Renaissance texts, and drawing on plainchant as musical inspiration, while – in its series of fresh, vivid, and sharply-etched miniatures – eschewing the sentimentality which had become attached to Christmas and its music. Three centuries earlier, such combinations of old and new were just as apparent in the vast Christmas output of Michael Praetorius, the principal Lutheran composer of his age. Through works ranging from dramatic double-choir settings to the simplest harmonisations of chorales, this recording explores Praetorius as transmitter of older Christmas texts and and melodies. The links between Praetorius’s time and ours are represented in the pairing of Praetorius’s Es ist ein Ros entsprungen and David Blackwell’s exquisite reimagining of the same carol, Lo how a rose e’er blooming. An Advent chant forms the basis of Judith Weir’s haunting Look down ye heavens from above which opens the recording, while Cecilia McDowall’s Now may we singen perfectly captures the exuberance of its medieval text and Jonathan Dove’s The Three Kings evokes the strangeness of Dorothy L. Sayers’s transformation of the story of the Magi. All downloads include booklets