Boris Ord
Boris Ord is remembered for one carol: his spare setting of the medieval text Adam lay ybounden. It remains a fixture of English Christmas programmes and of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols tradition he helped shape at King’s College, Cambridge.
Ord spent decades as organist and choirmaster at King’s, steering the chapel choir toward earlier repertoire and away from the heavier Victorian fare that had dominated before him. Composition was never his main public work; Adam lay ybounden, written late in his career, is his only published piece. The setting is brief and unfussy, letting the old words carry the weight, which is why choirs still reach for it beside Warlock, Ledger and other familiar carols. On Australian discs it appears in Christmas programmes that mix traditional arrangements with twentieth-century English church music.
Compositions by Boris Ord appear on
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
The Choir of Ormond College, directed by Douglas Lawrence, presents a varied selection of twenty-eight Christmas carols. Familiar favourites sit beside Bach and Pachelbel organ pieces and twentieth-century settings.
The Choir of Ormond College Melbourne
Directed by Douglas Lawrence, who led chapel music at Ormond College, Melbourne, for more than twenty years, this recording presents the college choir in English church music of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.