Finzi, Bax & Ireland: Choral Music by Hyperion Records Ltd

Author:Hyperion Records Ltd [Hyperion Records Ltd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Finzi, Bax & Ireland: Choral Music
Publisher: Hyperion Records Ltd
Published: 2016-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

Richard Crashaw (1612/3-1649)

after St Thomas Aquinas' Adoro te and Lauda Sion salvatorem

Magnificat, Op 36

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) (composer)

SSAATTBB + organ; written for Iva Dee Hiatt and Robert Beckwith and the Choirs of Smith and Amherst Colleges, Massachusetts, Christmas 1952

Bible (author of text)

Luke 1: 46-55

Jeremy Suppey (treble)

Simon Ponsford (countertenor)

Westminster Abbey Choir

James O'Donnell (conductor)

Daniel Cook (organ)

Shortly after the publication of Let us now praise famous men in 1952, Finzi received a commission from Iva Dee Hiatt of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, for a setting of the Magnificat to be sung at the choir’s Christmas Vespers. Here Finzi’s deference to the baroque is realized in a concerto form where the seminal opening line of the text (‘My soul doth magnify’) recurs throughout the structure as a ritornello. But, like Lo, the full, final sacrifice, Finzi also includes distinctive secondary lyrical material in the guise of ‘For he hath regarded: the lowliness of his handmaiden’ which returns with commensurate poignancy (‘And his mercy is on them that fear him’). This, together with Mary’s exclamation, serves to punctuate the through-composed structure. In the moving final ‘Amen’, Finzi clearly looked back to the closing bars of Lo, the full, final sacrifice in their Bachian majesty and diatonic transparency; yet one also senses too that he was, perhaps, also paying tribute, however unconsciously, to Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No 5, for not only is the key (D major) the same, but the heartrending, yearning, richly contrapuntal texture seems to recall those resplendent, numinous concluding pages of the symphony’s finale.

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