VENI CREATOR: the new single with ORA Singers OUT NOW!

In 2025 ORA Singers marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Orlando Gibbons’ death with Songs of Angels, a programme of choral music preserved in this landmark recording in its Reflections series. Here, Renaissance masterworks inspire living composers to respond in their own voices – not in imitation of Gibbons, but in dialogue with him across the centuries.

Will Todd’s Veni Creator takes the ancient hymn as a shared point of departure, expanding Gibbons’ modal clarity into slow-moving chords of resonant colour.
Each of these reflections offers a different view of Gibbons’ art. LeFanu, Galvani, McDowall, Weeks, Baker and Todd all draw something personal from his example – his precision, his lyricism, his poise – offering music that belongs wholehearted to our own century while affirming the continuity of English choral tradition.

Songs of Angels stands, then, as both commemorative and a celebration of the new. Through ORA Singers’ performances, the music of Orlando Gibbons and his modern counterparts meets in mutual illumination. What emerges in this recording is not a ‘compare and contrast’ approach, but rather a sense of deep connection whereby the clarity, balance and expressiveness found in music written four centuries ago continues to inspire composers and move audiences today.

Dr Francis Knights