This comes to us under the auspices of Washington National Cathedral’s New American Choral Music Series. Stephen Caracciolo has composed for Cantus, the Maryland State Boychoir, and a host of church and collegiate ensembles. While he is from the USA, everything about this program of his choral songs suggests the UK. He writes in the warm, gentle sacred idiom of John Rutter, though without the big tunes. When he brings on the brass and drums for a ringing hymn like “Christ, Victorious Christ, Now Reigning” he sounds like Rutter there too. Maestro McCarthy was Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s assistant with the Monteverdi Choir before leaving Britain to become Director of Music at the National Cathedral 11 years ago. Cathedra, his choir of 18, sports 3 male altos and a pure, straight-toned soprano that sound on loan from the Old Country. Think Union Jack, not Stars and Stripes.

The singers do a lovely job with Caracciolo’s radiant fare; from Aquinas’s “Adoro te devote” to a Durufle-like “Ubi Caritas”, to a lilting “There is No Rose”, to the aforementioned “Christ, Victorious” where the stops are pulled out for the first (and only) time in the program. The warm fuzzy idiom does become predictable after a while, but nothing says you have to take it in all at once. However massive its space, the National Cathedral offers a hospitable setting for the warm, intimate sound sought by Gothic’s engineers. They must have reconfigured the microphones for that one brassy hymn because it sounds a little muddy. Everything else is clear as a bell. Notes, texts and translations (for the few things in Latin).

---American Record Guide