PARRY Songs of Farewell (Westminster Abbey Choir)
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Genre:
Vocal
Label: Hyperion
Magazine Review Date: 07/2020
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 65
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: CDA68301
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
(3) Motets |
Charles Villiers Stanford, Composer
James O'Donnell, Conductor Westminster Abbey Choir |
Magnificat and Nunc dimittis |
Alan Gray, Composer
James O'Donnell, Conductor Westminster Abbey Choir |
Magnificat |
Charles Villiers Stanford, Composer
James O'Donnell, Conductor Westminster Abbey Choir |
Nunc dimittis |
Charles Wood, Composer
James O'Donnell, Conductor Westminster Abbey Choir |
(6) Songs of Farewell |
(Charles) Hubert (Hastings) Parry, Composer
James O'Donnell, Conductor Westminster Abbey Choir |
Author: Andrew Mellor
The four composers were all born within the two decades from 1848 and, to varying degrees, had an eye and ear on the bigger musical picture (Bach, polyphonic and antiphonic traditions) in writing choral music rooted in its time and place yet resonating far beyond those coordinates. It’s a nourishing, consistent programme of music for voices alone, for which the choir of Westminster Abbey travelled to the vaulting acoustic of All Hallows, Gospel Oak.
The ensemble rides that acoustic knowingly, using its echo and harbouring its resonance, but the anatomy of its sound is as distinctive as it is lopsided: trebles capable of pinpoint accuracy, extraordinary blend (for children) and soaring confidence but low adult voices heavy with a vibrato that can obscure pitch and middle voices in danger of disappearing in between the two. Otherwise, for maturity, accuracy and a confident wall of sound, Westminster Abbey’s choir has perhaps never more resembled David Hill’s Winchester Cathedral Choir of the 1990s – a high-water mark.
The masterpieces come at the beginning and the end, the motets by Stanford and the songs by Parry, in which whole worlds of pain, belief, hope and tradition are condensed into telling cadences that internalise rather than boast about technique and aspiration (in contrast to Stanford’s Bach-study B flat Magnificat, which undeniably does, and Gray’s F minor Service, which gets too close). It’s in these more classical designs that O’Donnell’s choir shows its poise: thrillingly bright and straight-backed in Stanford’s ‘Caelos ascendit hodie’ (and judicious in that vibrant final cadence) and going with the flow in the tremendous text-led freedoms of Parry’s Songs of Farewell, the most remarkable meeting of English choral style with sheer instinct. In that work, this is tonally and textually a soft-edged performance in comparison with Robert Quinney’s from New College, Oxford, and Nigel Short’s crystalline and agile Tenebrae recording (currently a first-choice recommendation). But it radiates an optimism of its own, which may well prove even more special in the long run.
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