Howells - Choral Works
Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge / Stephen Layton with Simon Bland, Jeremy Cole (org)
Hyperion CDA67914 Buy now
(64’ • DDD • T/t)
A Hymn for St Cecilia. Salve regina. Evening Services – ‘Gloucester Service’; ‘St Paul’s Service’. Take him, earth, for cherishing. Requiem. All my hope on God is founded
Requiem – selected comparisons:
Corydon Sgrs, Best (10/87) (HYPE) CDA66076
Cambridge Sgrs, Rutter (12/92) (CLGM) COLCD118
Ch of St John’s Coll, Cambridge, Robinson (1/00) (NAXO) 8 554659
Vasari Sgrs, Backhouse (4/04) (SIGN) SIGCD503
Hyperion’s disc is all the more impressive for dispelling the clouds of dissonance that have given Howells the bad name of a meandering mystic and letting us hear what a fine ear he had, not just for the juicy suspension or overpowering cadence but for deft two-part harmony, as one finds throughout the understated Gloucester Canticles. The choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, is ideally pure and full in tone. The grand hymns and canticles are extrovert and focused, the intimate supplications such as Take him, earth sung with great poise. Comparisons can flatter to deceive but, by the side of the Trinity choir’s Requiem, the Choir of St John’s sounds too quick, the Vasari Singers too distant, the Cambridge Singers a little plain; even my previous favourite, the Corydon Singers, don’t alight on chords with quite the full and alert appreciation of what makes Howells Howells, that impassioned, modally inflected application to the personal and the numinous which reminds me more of Bruckner than Stanford. How good it is to hear the St Paul’s Service not swallowed up by the dome of that cathedral but still buttressed by a mighty Willis beast, belonging in this case to Lincoln. In a recital of many highlights, I have returned again and again to the St Paul’s Nunc dimittis: spaciously paced and surely directed towards a ritardando of almighty breadth more associated with the ambivalent Catholic Mahler than the equally ambivalent Protestant Howells. This is a perfect disc of its kind.
Peter Quantrill
