Review: A fascinating survey of almost three centuries of communal singing, performed with sweetness, devotion and even a touch of earthy enthusiasm where required.

Songlist: Colchester, The Humble Suit of a Sinner, The Lamentation of a Sinner, The Humble Complaint of a Sinner, Brevity, Cambridge Short/Southwell, Watford, The beauty of Isr'el is slain, Thomas-Town, Chester, Chesterfield, Who is this that cometh from Edom?, Worcester, Amanda, Montgomery, Windham, Ode on Music, All Saints, Rainbow, Schenectady, Greenwich, Decay, Evening Hymn

Review: Composer Frank Ferko's majestic new Stabat Mater (The Mother Stood) broadens the embrace of this profound medieval hymn depicting Mary at the Crucifixion. Ferko supplements the original Latin text on the theme of premature death with passages from classical Greek drama and modern verse. Ferko (b. 1950) composed his Stabat Mater in 1998 for the a capella mixed choir His Majestie's Clerkes. The Chicago Tribune pronounced their concert premiere of Ferko's Stabat Mater a classical highlight of 1999: "a marvelously intricate and sincerely devout tour de force that showed off the Clerke's disciplined, sensitive, and uncommonly nuanced singing." Writer Ted Shen asked rhetorically, "When will Frank Ferko be recognized for what he is, a talented and erudite innovator of old vocal genres?" With his fugal writing, Ferko "plays" the choir like an organ. Not surprisingly, Ferko is a veteran church organist and choral director as well as composer. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Northwestern University, where he studied with Alan Stout. The work consists of 25 miniature pieces (20 Latin stanzas and five English interpolations) "that fit together much like a mosaic," Ferko writes in the CD booklet. Musically, the composition employs "old-fashioned" concepts: tonal centers, church modes, major and minor keys, counterpoint, and melody. The music digresses occasionally, "but there is a basic tonal framework for the entire composition," Ferko writes. He describes the tonal center as progressing through two "arches," from E to B-flat and from B-flat back to E --"and beyond, in the final chorale."

Songlist: Stabat Mater, Cujus animam gementem, O quam tristis, Quae maerebat, Andromache's lament, Quis est homo, Quis non posset, Pro peccatis, Vidit suum, The Mother, Eia mater, Fac ut ardeat, Sancta mater, Tui nati, Layout, Haiku for an East Asia Scholar, Ancho y Ajeno, RSVP, Fac me tecum, Juxta crucem, Virgo virginum, Fac ut portem, Elegy, Fac me plagis, Flammis ne, Christe cum sit, Quando corpus