Composer: Richard Rodney Bennett, Edward William Elgar, William Henry Harris, Gustav Theodore Holst, Herbert Norman Howells, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, Arthur Seymour Sullivan, John Tavener, Ralph Vaughan Williams
Performer: Tenebrae
Conductor: Nigel Short
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Signum
Catalogue: SIGCD267
Release: 2011
Size: 633 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Holst: The Evening-watch, H159
02. Bennett: A Good-night
03. Howells: Take him, earth, for cherishing
04. Tavener: Funeral Ikos
Parry: Songs of Farewell
05. My Soul, There is a Country
06. I Know My Soul Hath Power to Know All Things
07. Never Weather-Beaten Sail
08. There is an Old Belief
09. At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners
10. Lord, Let Me Know Mine End
11. Elgar: They are at rest
12. Vaughan Williams: The Turtle Dove
13. Sullian, arr. Lawson: The Long Day Closes
14. Vaughan Williams: Rest
15. Harris: Bring us, O Lord God
Following a string of five-star reviews for their previous discs of 20th-century French choral music (Poulenc’s Figure Humaine ) and Renaissance polyphony (Victoria’s Requiem), the professional chamber-choir Tenebrae go from strength to strength with this new recording of British partsongs and choral music – centred on Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell.
Composed towards the end of Parry’s life, the Songs of Farewell have taken on something of an epithetical interpretation; they are almost a musical summation of his compositional life, reflecting Parry’s love of English renaissance madrigals and partsongs as much as the influence on his work from German composers like Brahms – made more complicated as these works were composed as the country (and its music) fell out of favour at the start of the Great War.