Apollo5 | Haven

Haven, the sixth solo studio album from Apollo5, explores the music and poetry of troubled, displaced and persecuted authors, from the Tudor musician William Byrd – who secretly continued a commitment to Catholicism at the height of the Protestant Reformation – to Romantic poets, twentieth-century songwriters and contemporary Ukrainian composers currently writing in exile. This music often has a dual purpose – it can document the plight and struggle of its creators whilst also casting a restorative light and striking an optimistic note, refreshing the listener whilst acting as a nourishing balm for the sorrowful, oppressed or exiled writer.

A collection of pieces old and new, with repertoire spanning four centuries and with six tracks commissioned and recorded especially for this disc, Haven is centred around William Byrd’s Mass For Five Voices, a full recording of which is scattered across the album. Interspersed with this Mass setting is the opulent polyphony of Renaissance composer Philippe de Monte (also Byrd’s religious confidant), a twentieth-century spiritual by the “Dean of Black Women Composers” Undine Smith Moore, and new works and arrangements written for the group by Paul Smith, Anna Kuzina-Rozhdestvenskaya and Apollo5 soprano Penelope Appleyard.

Taken together, the collection explores how composers and songwriters deploy music and text as a comforting embrace, as a shelter against an oncoming or aggressively present storm, or else as crucial aspirations for peace, rest and hope. 

Haven was released on 20 October 2023 and the group performed an album launch concert at St James’s Piccadilly.

Apollo5: Haven

Label: VOCES8 Records

Distribution: Nova

Release date: 20 October 2023

Catalogue No: VCM151

Barcode: 5060140211884

Format: CD Album

Price: £10.99

Track list:

1. Kyrie from Mass for Five Voices

2. Heaven-Haven

3. Gloria from Mass for Five Voices

4. Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi

5. Sonnet 81

6. Credo from Mass for Five Voices

7. We Shall Walk Through The Valley

8. Life-giving Spring

9. Easter Stikhere

10. Sanctus & Benedictus from Mass for Five Voices

11. Pia Virgo

12. Northern Lights

13. Agnus Dei from Mass for Five Voices

14. Agnus Dei

15. Angel

16. Wayfaring Stranger

17. Homeward Bound