Composer: Herbert Norman Howells
Performer: The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge
Conductor: Stephen Layton
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Hyperion
Catalogue: CDA67914
Release: 2012
Size: 279 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. A Hymn for St Cecilia
Anthems to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Op. 9
02. IV. Salve regina
Magnificat & Nunc dimittis (Gloucester, 1946)
03. I. Magnificat
04. II. Nunc dimittis
05. Take him, earth, for cherishing
Magnificat (St Paul’s Service)
06. I. Magnificat
07. II. Nunc dimittis
Requiem
08. I. Salvator mundi
09. II. Psalm 23
10. III. Requiem aeternam I
11. IV. Psalm 121
12. V. Requiem aeternam II
13. VI. I heard a voice from heaven
14. All my hope on God is founded
Herbert Howells was acutely sensitive to the transience of life, having witnessed the loss of friends and contemporaries in the First World War and encountered deep personal tragedy when his son Michael died of polio at the age of just nine. And so a mood of elegiac yearning inhabits much of his choral music: the austere, lovely a cappella Requiem, and the elegant Take him, earth, for cherishing, commissioned to commemorate the death of President John F Kennedy, here lovingly performed by the young voices of Trinity College Choir, Cambridge, in Hyperion’s Record of the Month for April 2012.
And yet Howells could write magnificently thrilling music too, as demonstrated by the fresh brilliance of A Hymn for St Cecilia, the spine-tingling grandeur of the St Paul’s Service, or the life-affirming hymn ‘All my hope on God is founded’, here further sweetened with a descant by John Rutter.