For All the Saints (Fernando Ortega)

Fernando Ortega built his reputation over three decades on a specific, patient approach to hymn material: sparse piano-and-voice arrangements that trust a familiar text to carry weight without a full choir or orchestra behind it. For All the Saints, his November 2024 EP and his first new collection in four years, applies that method to five congregational hymns, closing on the title track – and unlike Indelible Grace’s 2003 recording, reviewed alongside this one, Ortega keeps Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sine Nomine” tune fully intact rather than replacing it.

That choice changes what the arrangement is actually doing. Where Vaughan Williams wrote Sine Nomine for a full congregation and organ, and Indelible Grace shrank the text down to a different, smaller melody entirely, Ortega keeps the original tune’s shape but performs it alone – voice and piano, unhurried tempo, no choir answering back. The effect is closer to overhearing someone sing the hymn privately than to attending the service it was written for: the same wide melodic lines Vaughan Williams built for massed voices, now carried by one voice that lets each phrase breathe and occasionally catch before the next line. It’s a legitimately different experience of the same tune rather than a competing one, in a way the Indelible Grace version – built on different material entirely – can’t claim.

As the closing track on a five-song EP explicitly built to reintroduce congregational hymns to listeners who may not sing them elsewhere, it’s a well-chosen ending: a text about the full communion of the faithful across centuries, delivered as quietly and personally as a single believer sitting with it alone. The scale Ortega gives up next to the Wells Cathedral recording, he recovers as intimacy.

7.9/10 – the same famous tune, shrunk from a cathedral to a single room, trading communal scale for something quieter and just as effective.

Hero image: “For All the Saints” stained glass window, All Saints Episcopal Church, Jensen Beach, Florida, by Stephen B Calvert, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.