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Britain's Voces8 are recognized for their elegant balance and range of color, including smooth harmonies that have been compared to the King's Singers. Their repertory ranges from early Renaissance choral-vocal music to Gershwin and contemporaries, sometimes within the same recording. Following success in competitions, they emerged with From Gibbons to Gershwin in 2007. Four albums later, they took on Brahms, Bruckner, Reger in 2011, and their Decca debut, Eventide, charted in the U.K. upon its release in 2013. While they had already released a Christmas album, Winter focused on winter-themed songs more so than holiday music in 2016, and over a dozen albums into their career, 2019's Enchanted Isle reimagined material originally written for film and television. The ensemble was featured on Christopher Tin's The Lost Birds in 2022.

Devising their name on the spur of the moment en route to a competition in Italy, Voces8 was formed in 2005 by ex-choristers of the Choir of Westminster Abbey. The singers took on professional status in 2007, the year they issued From Gibbons to Gershwin, which spanned Orlando Gibbons (b. 1583) and George Gershwin (b. 1898). Considered their official debut, Evensong arrived on their own label, VCM Records, in 2008. After signing with Signum Classics, they presented Aces High, a collection of pop songs and movie themes that included, among other songs, Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal and The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations. It arrived in early 2010 and was followed later the same year by Bach: Motets. In 2011, Voces8 released both Brahms, Reger, Bruckner and their first Christmas album, titled simply Christmas. A Choral Tapestry revisited composers such as Brahms, Reger, and Gibbons in 2012, and the following year brought A Purcell Collection, a collaboration with Les Inventions. In the meantime, the lineup-shifting group established a busy touring schedule with an international reach.

Voces8 moved to Decca in 2013, making their label debut with Eventide. It covered composers as diverse as film scorer John Williams, Benjamin Britten, and then-newcomer Ola Gjeilo. Marking their debut on the U.K. album chart, it reached number 59. That year, original member Paul Smith also published a textbook, The VOCES8 Method. The album Night Scapes: Choral Music for Reflective Moments followed a year later. Issued in 2015, Lux included works by Tavener and Elgar as well as singer/songwriter Ben Folds, and 2016's Winter saw them joined by artists including pianist Huw Watkins and violinist Mari Samuelsen. Still with Decca, Equinox arrived in 2018, and in 2019, they offered the soundtrack-themed Enchanted Isle. Voces8 has commissioned new works on several occasions; a new work by Jonathan Dove was premiered by the group in 2019. To mark its 15th anniversary in 2020, Voces8 issued the album After Silence; it was released in four parts, culminating in a full-scale double album. Voces8 released the meditation-oriented crossover album Infinity on Decca in 2021, and returned on their Voces8 label with the small vocal group Apollo5 in 2022 on the album Paul Smith: Renewal? That year, Voces8 was featured on Christopher Tin: The Lost Birds. ~ Marcy Donelson & James Manheim

Most music lovers have encountered George Frederick Handel through holiday-time renditions of the Messiah's "Hallelujah" chorus. And many of them know and love that oratorio on Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as well as a few other greatest hits like the orchestral Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, and perhaps bits of Judas Maccabeus or one of the other English oratorios. Yet his operas, for which he was widely known in his own time, are the province mainly of specialists in Baroque music, and the events of his life, even though they reflected some of the most important musical issues of the day, have never become as familiar as the careers of Bach or Mozart. Perhaps the single word that best describes his life and music is "cosmopolitan": he was a German composer, trained in Italy, who spent most of his life in England.

Handel was born in the German city of Halle on February 23, 1685. His father noted but did not nurture his musical talent, and he had to sneak a small keyboard instrument into his attic to practice. As a child he studied music with Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, organist at the Liebfrauenkirche, and for a time he seemed destined for a career as a church organist himself. After studying law briefly at the University of Halle, Handel began serving as organist on March 13, 1702, at the Domkirche there. Dissatisfied, he took a post as violinist in the Hamburg opera orchestra in 1703, and his frustration with musically provincial northern Germany was perhaps shown when he fought a duel the following year with the composer Mattheson over the accompaniment to one of Mattheson's operas. In 1706 Handel took off for Italy, then the font of operatic innovation, and mastered contemporary trends in Italian opera seria. He returned to Germany to become court composer in Hannover, whose rulers were linked by family ties with the British throne; his patron there, the Elector of Hannover, became King George I of England. English audiences took to his 1711 opera Rinaldo, and several years later Handel jumped at the chance to move to England permanently. He impressed King George early on with the Water Music of 1716, written as entertainment for a royal boat outing. Much of his keyboard music, including the suite with the famous melody "The Harmonious Blacksmith" dates from just before his going to Italy and his first decade in England. For 18 months, between 1717 and 1719, Handel was house composer to the Duke of Chandos, for whom he composed the 11 Chandos Anthems for chorus and string orchestra. He also founded the Royal Academy of Music, a new opera company in London, with the support of the Duke and other patrons. Through the 1720s Handel composed Italian operatic masterpieces for London stages: Ottone, Serse (Xerxes), and other works often based on classical stories. His popularity was dented, though, by new English-language works of a less formal character, and in the 1730s and 1740s, after the Academy failed, Handel turned to the oratorio, a grand form that attracted England's new middle-class audiences. Not only Messiah but also Israel in Egypt, Samson, Saul, and many other works established him as a venerated elder of English music. The oratorios displayed to maximum effect Handel's melodic gift and the sense of timing he brought to big choral numbers. Among the most popular of all the oratorios was Judas Maccabeus, composed in 32 days in 1746. His Concerti grossi, Op. 6, and organ concertos also appeared in the same period. In 1737, Handel suffered a stroke, which caused both temporary paralysis in his right arm and some loss of his mental faculties, but he recovered sufficiently to carry on most normal activity. He was urged to write an autobiography, but never did. Blind in old age, he continued to compose. He died in London on April 14, 1759. More than 3,000 mourners were present for the funeral of the famous composer. He was buried at Westminster Abbey and received full state honors. Beethoven thought Handel the greatest of all his predecessors; he once said, "I would bare my head and kneel at his grave." ~ TiVo Staff

British composer Bob Chilcott has gained popularity in his home country and beyond for choral music ranging from works for children to substantial adult compositions. Unusually, he came to composition later in life, after a long career as a singer.

Robert "Bob" Chilcott was born April 9, 1955. As with so many other vocal performers and composers, his path into music led through a place as a boy singer, in his case at the Choir of King's College, Cambridge. He rejoined the choir as a student at King's College, where he also conducted a university choral society. After graduation, he sang professionally for several years and then joined the King's Singers crossover vocal ensembles in 1985, singing tenor and remaining with the group until 1997. At that point, he departed to pursue composition full-time. One of his most popular early compositions was Can You Hear Me?, a work with a deaf protagonist that includes a sign language component. Chilcott has conducted the work in at least eight countries, including a 2001 performance in Vancouver, Canada, that featured 2,000 singers.

Chilcott's association with the New Orleans Children's Chorus has produced A Little Jazz Mass and other works. Also in New Orleans, This Day, a set of five choral songs, was premiered in 2007 at St. Louis Cathedral by a nationwide choir. In Britain he has conducted the Royal College of Music Chorus and the BBC Singers, of which he is principal guest conductor. He is also president and occasional conductor of the highly regarded Southend Boys Choir.

In the 2010s Chilcott has occupied himself with the composition of larger works, including the Requiem (2010), first performed in Chilcott's adult home of Oxford. His St. John Passion appeared in 2013, and in the U.S. his Ophelia, Caliban, and Miranda was performed at the picfest festival in Eugene, Oregon, with Chilcott conducting both a choir and the Yellowjackets jazz band. His short choral compositions are featured on numerous British cathedral choir releases, and several of his jazz-influenced works were collected on the 2017 Naxos label release All Good Things. ~ James Manheim

Barnaby Smith is artistic director of the vocal chamber ensemble VOCES8, a countertenor, a conductor, an arranger, and an educator as well. His musical interests range from Renaissance music to contemporary pop.

Smith began his musical career as a chorister at Westminster Abbey, where he often appeared as a treble soloist; he performed with the group at the BBC Proms and other nationally prominent events. He went on to Bedford School, where he was a music scholar (performing at school events in return for reduced tuition), and then to a gap year singing with the Winchester Cathedral Choir, performing as a soloist with the Wayneflete Signers, and joining the staff of the Pilgrims' School. Smith earned a Specialist Early Music Performance degree at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where he studied voice with countertenor Andreas Scholl and bass Ulrich Messthaler. He also sang in the Royal School of Church Music's Millennium Youth Choir. A stint in the Britten-Pears Young Artists Programme helped launch his varied career, conducting the Voces Cantabiles choir and making solo appearances in Handel's Messiah, HWV 56, Bach's St. John Passion, BWV 245, and a semi-staged production of Handel's dramatic oratorio Saul, HWV 53. Conducting Voces Cantabiles, Smith made his recording debut on the Naxos label in 2007 with an album of works by Robert Parsons.

In 2003, Smith and his brother Paul Smith founded VOCES8. The group took shape as friends from the Millennium Youth Choir continued to gather and sing after they aged out of the group; they traveled to Switzerland on a lark for a competition and ended up winning. VOCES8 is unusual in its composition, with six male singers, including two countertenors (Barnaby Smith being one) and two women. VOCES8 has performed around Britain, the U.S., and continental Europe. Smith continues to serve as artistic director. He maintains his solo career and has performed across Britain and in such prestigious international halls as the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and Mariinsky Theatre Concert Hall. He has led major orchestras as a conductor, including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic. Smith has conducted VOCES8 on some 15 recordings and has appeared as a conductor or countertenor on various other projects. He is also in demand as a choir trainer and educator, having been co-curator of the Master's program in singing at Cambridge University. In 2021, Smith led VOCES8 on the Naxos album Infinity. ~ James Manheim

John Francis Wade's name comes to our attention most often around Christmas time: it is his arrangement of the well-known carol "Adeste fideles" (O come, all ye faithful), which is sung in Christian churches, Catholic, and Protestant, around the world. Yet Wade is more than a musical "one-hit wonder." By far the more important work of his life was his production of a large series of books of Catholic plainchant, both printed and manuscript copies. An enthusiastic throwback to the old days of the monastic scriptorium, Wade perfected his own hand at calligraphy, illumination, and the copying of plainchant worship music. His manuscripts served the Catholic liturgy in the chapels of most of London's foreign embassies, as well as the private chapels of many English, American, and European Catholic aristocrats. He also published editions of Catholic liturgical books for wider dissemination. He has been called the "father of the English plainchant revival."

Unfortunately, very little is known of Wade's actual biography. His father's name may have been John Wade: a Yorkish man of this name converted to Roman Catholicism around 1730, and John Francis Wade is known to have studied on the continent at a Dominican College (in Bornhem, Flanders) and to have joined the Marian Confraternity of the Rosary at that time. From around 1737 to 1774, Wade apparently lived in London and wrote his numerous chantbooks. Though he seems to have personally espoused the Jacobite cause and hoped for a renewal of the Stuart line, his political activities may have been limited to propagandizing hymns such as "Adeste fideles" and "Vexilla regis." At any rate, his musical influence was quite wide: Samuel Wesley corresponded with him and Vincent Novello published his work. His championing of Catholic plainchant helped fuel the British national revival of early music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Franz Xaver Gruber was born in Hochberg, Austria, the son of a poor weaver whose intentions were that his son would follow in the family trade. As the young Franz Gruber came of age he discovered that his true interest was in music, and he cultivated it by taking music lessons in secret from organist Georg Hartdobler at the parish church in Burghausen. When Hartdobler died, Gruber replaced him in the post. In 1807 Gruber accepted a teaching post in Arnsdorf where he served also as organist and sexton, and from 1816 Gruber also filled in from time to time in the frequently vacant organ loft at the church at St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf. In Oberndorf Gruber met Friar Joseph Mohr (1792 - 1848), who was serving as an assistant pastor at St. Nikolaus and adept at writing sacred poetry. Mohr may have contributed the text to the German Te Deum which Gruberset in February 1818.

According to Gruber, on December 24, 1818 Mohr provided him with the poem "Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!" along with the request that Gruber set it for two voices, chorus, and guitar. Gruber finished the work that same day, and Silent Night, arguably the most popular of all sacred Christmas carols, was heard for the first time during Midnight Mass at St. Nikolaus. The congregation received the piece with "great applause," but the long journey of Silent Night throughout the world did not begin until the following year, when organ builder Karl Mauracher visited St. Nikolaus to perform routine repairs on the organ and came away with a copy of Silent Night. Mauracher introduced the song to two well-known groups of Austrian "family singers" based in the Ziller Valley, the Rainers and the Strassers. These singers would spread Silent Night throughout the world; the Rainers sang it in Russia as early as 1822 at the request of Tsar Alexander I, and in 1839 the Strassers introduced the carol to the United States.

Although Silent Night made its way into print in 1819, some believed it to be a traditional Tyrolean folk song of no traceable lineage, although certain sources attributed the melody to Michael Haydn. Gruber kept silent about the matter until 1855, when he published a corrected version of Mohr's text and the original melody under his own name for the first time. In the interim he had moved on from Oberndorf "due to territorial changes" to teaching positions in Laufen and later Bergdorf, finally settling down in 1833 to a post as choir-director and organist at the parish-church in Hallein until his death at the age of 76.

Gruber was a prolific composer. A thematic catalog of his manuscripts published in 1989 claims more than 60 masses for Gruber, plus more than two dozen additional liturgical settings and about 35 songs both sacred and secular. Gruber also wrote dance music and made copious amounts of arrangements of popular melodies taken from operas. But out of all this activity, it is Silent Night that truly prevails, and it has paid off handsomely for Gruber: there are museums dedicated to him in Arnsdorf and Hallein, and a chapel built in honor of Silent Night itself opened in Oberndorf in 1937.

Best remembered for "The Syncopated Clock" and the holiday classic "Sleigh Ride," Leroy Anderson was one of America's most popular composers of light, melodic orchestral music. A talented conductor and arranger to boot, he had a particular knack for creating humorous sound effects with standard orchestral instruments and percussion.

Anderson was born June 29, 1908, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family of Swedish immigrants. His mother played the organ in church, and gave her young son lessons; starting at age 11, he studied piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, and also took private lessons on the double bass. He entered Harvard in 1925 to study music, playing both trombone and double bass in the orchestra; he also sang in the glee club and joined the marching band as drum major and arranger (some of his arrangements of collegiate songs are still performed at Harvard). After graduation, Anderson stayed around to earn his master's degree, then took a teaching post at Radcliffe College. He also directed the marching band from 1931 to 1935, performed as a freelance organist and bassist, and continued his graduate studies in German and Scandinavian languages.

In 1935, Anderson quit his teaching job to become a full-time freelancer. The following year, he was tapped by the Boston Pops Orchestra to arrange and conduct a medley of his Harvard song arrangements. Director Arthur Fiedler liked his work so well that Fiedler requested an original composition, which Anderson delivered in the form of "Jazz Pizzicato." Premiered in 1938, "Jazz Pizzicato" was a hit with audiences, leading to a follow-up called "Jazz Legato" and a full-time position for Anderson as the Boston Pops' arranger and orchestrator. That engagement was interrupted in 1942 by military service; Anderson spent much of World War II working in the Scandinavian intelligence division, and was eventually transferred back to Washington as he rose through the ranks. While working at the Pentagon in 1945, he composed one of his best-known tunes, "The Syncopated Clock"; he premiered it with the Boston Pops that year, along with "Promenade." When World War II ended, Anderson turned down a full-time intelligence post in Stockholm to return to music. He rejoined the Boston Pops as orchestrator/arranger from 1946 to 1950, settling in Woodbury, Connecticut.

During that period, "The Syncopated Clock" was catching on with orchestras and bands across the country. Anderson began to compose more prolifically, coming up with another popular piece in 1947's "Fiddle-Faddle," and also arranging a well-received medley of traditional Irish tunes, "The Irish Suite." In the middle of a particularly hot 1946 summer, he began work on the piece that would become "Sleigh Ride." Finally completed in early 1948, the tune would become a Christmas classic thanks to Anderson's imaginative sound effects (sleigh bells, clopping hooves, cracking whips, neighing trumpets, etc.).

In 1950, Anderson was offered the chance to lead his own 55-piece studio orchestra by Decca Records. His recording of "The Syncopated Clock" was soon adopted by CBS as the theme song to its long-lived Late Show movie program, thus ensuring its immortality. That year also brought two whimsical new hits in "The Typewriter" and "The Waltzing Cat," both laden with evocative sound effects. 1951 was an even bigger year; "Belle of the Ball" and "Plink! Plank! Plunk!" took their place in the Anderson canon, but the key item was "Blue Tango," a more exotic piece that topped the charts and, over 1951 to 1952, became one of the first instrumentals to sell one million copies.

In 1953, Anderson debuted a more serious, extended classical composition, "Concerto in C for Piano and Orchestra," with performances in Chicago and Cleveland. He withdrew the work in order to revise the first part, but never completed the intended changes. His family later published the concerto in its original form. More popular compositions followed in 1954, including "Bugler's Holiday," "Sandpaper Ballet" (another effects-oriented piece), and "Forgotten Dreams." In 1958, Anderson wrote his first and only Broadway musical, Goldilocks, in collaboration with writers/lyricists Walter and Jean Kerr.

He recorded for Decca through 1962, and remained active as a conductor and composer (the latter still primarily for the Boston Pops) into the early '70s. In 1972, he was the guest of honor on a Pops PBS special devoted to his works. He passed away on May 18, 1975. Thirteen years later, he was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Orchestras across America made Anderson's catalog one of the most performed in the country during his heyday; what was more, Anderson wrote different arrangements of his works for musicians of all different skill levels, helping ensure their accessibility and permanence in the orchestral/band repertoire. ~ Steve Huey