It took a long overdue revolution to prepare the ground for The Cambridge Singers. The professional chamber choir’s original members, recruited by John Rutter in 1982, were drawn from former female and male choristers of the colleges of Cambridge University. Those same colleges had only admitted women students for the first time in their long history a decade earlier. Rutter, who stepped down as music director of Cambridge’s Clare College at the end of the 1970s to focus all his efforts on composition, formed his ensemble for a one-off Christmas television special. The ad hoc group and its founder/conductor clicked and attracted critical acclaim with their first recordings of Rutter’s Gloria and his revelatory chamber performance edition of Fauré’s Requiem. The Cambridge Singers became a fixture of the British choral scene after Rutter launched Collegium Records, run since 1984 from an outbuilding at his Cambridgeshire home. They progressed to create a catalog comprising definitive albums of Rutter’s compositions and discs formed from carefully constructed programs of choral music past and present.