Campion
Author of Light
Never Weather-beaten Sail
Tune Thy Music To Thy Heart
Howells
Take Him, Earth for Cherishing
McDowall
An Unexpected Shore
Parry
Songs of Farewell
Mediaeval carols
Deo Gracias, Anglia
Saint Thomas Honour We
Benedicite Deo
O Blessed Lord
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers Director
CORO COR16189
Full Price
The Review
The album takes its title from the fourth of Parry’s Songs of Farewell. This is one of those programmes that I suspect works wonderfully in concert but feels too fractured to hang together on disc. There is logic, in that it is the latest edition of the group’s choral pilgrimage that they tour round England’s cathedrals, but it perhaps is best thought of as a souvenir of that progress.
Of course The Sixteen sing the huge variety of works splendidly and Christophers finds just the right tempo and atmosphere for each. I am just not sure I want Hubert Parry and Herbert Howells’ music interrupted by mediaeval carols. The harmonic jolts are too disconcerting. Equally, it would be nice to settle into the group of Jacobean pieces by Thomas Campion rather than have them spread among the others of such different date and sentiment.
That said, there is some superb music here. I am biased (because she has set some of my poetry brilliantly over the years) but I do think Cecilia McDowall is one of the finest contemporary composers for voices, up at the top of the tree with James Macmillan. Her An Unexpected Shore is taken from the three movement Good News from New England, a portrait of the Pilgrim fathers. I wish the other two movements had been included so that the work could provide a substantial balance to five Parry’s Songs of Farewell. Placed between a carol and Campion it feels unnecessarily isolated.
Parry made his own version of Campion’s Never Weather-beaten Sail (there are not many writers whose music is just as good as their poetry) and fine as it is in context, the original wins in direct comparison. The set of motets that make up the Songs of Farewell date from 1907 onwards into the World War I years, so cannot be thought of as especially valedictory for Parry himself, though they all capture a deep melancholy without ever despairing. Perhaps the emotion that underlies them most is consolation and that explains their lasting power. Although he often set religious or quasi-religious texts, he (like Vaughan Williams) was not firmly convinced by the Church, though in these verses he found the sort of expressions of deep thoughtfulness that Finzi portrayed so movingly two generations later. The songs account for almost half the disc and they are its finest feature. Maybe in future years CORO could recast the programme and give us a record of the Parry, more Howells, some Holst and all of the McDowall.
SM