This is another exemplary addition to the Finzi Singers’ ever-expanding discography. The earliest offerings here comprise Even such is time, an unpublished effort from 1913 (labelled on the manuscript as “Student Homework for Dr Charles Wood”, Howells’s professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Royal College of Music), and Haec dies, the latter the last of eight memorable a cappella pieces written for Richard Terry and his Westminster Cathedral Choir during the period 1912-18. (Spicer and his admirable group have already recorded all the other surviving examples – including the amazingly assured Mass in the Dorian Mode – Chandos, 12/92.) The ravishing Three Carol-Anthems (1918-20) are products of Howells’s early maturity and include that much-loved gem “A spotless rose” with its breathtakingly beautiful close (“Oh Herbert! That cadence!” as Patrick Hadley used to inscribe his annual Christmas card to the composer). The motet Blessed are the dead dates from April 1920 and bears a dedication to the memory of Howells’s father, Oliver, who had died the previous year; it is heard here in a completion by Patrick Russill (who also supplies the authoritative booklet-notes).
Moving on three decades, we encounter the 1953 Coronation anthem Behold, O God our defender, the rousing 1958 motet God is gone up, as well as the two part-songs after Walter de la Mare: Inheritance was Howells’s contribution to A Garland for the Queen (along with Bliss’s Aubade and Tippett’s Dance, Clarion Air one of the more technically demanding items in that particular collection), while The Scribe – an especially beguiling creation – was conceived as an eighty-fifth birthday tribute to Vaughan Williams. Finally, we have the big Te Deum written in 1965 for the Church of St Mary, Redcliffe, Bristol, and Thee will I love, a heartfelt setting from 1970 of words by Robert Bridges, “commemorating the massacre of the monks of the Abbey of Medehamstede – now Peterborough Cathedral – in AD 870”.
As we have now come to expect from this partnership on record, these are splendidly fervent, finely disciplined performances (one readily forgives the occasional raw sonority from the sopranos). Excellent Chandos engineering, too. A hearty recommendation.'