Testimonials
A review of 'Folksongs and Fancies'...
"Despite my lifetime interest in boys' singing, I confess I had not heard of the NBC until a contact posted, on an international message board dedicated to boys' voices, about your latest CD. He was impressed, and gave the link to your website. The tracklist contained so many songs that I had sung in my own childhood 60 years ago that I was immediately attracted; the sampler suggested that NBC was a choir worth hearing as well as supporting; the reasonable cost and ease of payment made the rest a formality.
I hugely enjoyed playing through the CD earlier today. The folksong arrangements are well-judged, giving character as well as harmony and rhythm to those well loved tunes, but avoiding over-embellishment. The boys' singing is fresh and unaffected but also melodious and disciplined - I formed the view that each boy had been given the chance of a solo, and the personalities revealed are part of the appeal: the bigger voices among those solos would grace a cathedral, while the smaller voices had great charm. Most of all, they are unmistakeably boys' voices, relishing the chest register while resonant in head tone, and clearly enjoying and committed to their participation in choral music.
I doubted initially whether the alternation between choir and Tudor/Jacobean keyboard music could work. In fact it works well - a sort of oscillation between the formal and the informal, the composed and the traditional, both bound in to our national culture. And some of those harpsichord (virginals?) pieces are astonishing - I can scarce credit the chromaticism of Bull's Fantasia in A! Surely this is by young Johnny Bull of 51, Hill Crescent, Newark?
I would be grateful if my thanks and congratulations could be passed to Michael Overbury as the guiding spirit, to all involved in the NBC enterprise, and especially to the boys who perhaps trade in some 'street cred' to gain the joy of singing, but whose singing is itself a great credit to them and a joy to the world. I wish you all well."Peter Davis (Malvern, UK)