Howells - Hymnus Paradisi, A Kent Yeoman’s Wooing Song
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Label: Chandos - Classics
Cat No: CHAN10727X
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Vocal/Choral
Release Date: 2nd July 2012
Contents
Artists
Joan Rodgers (soprano)Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor)
Alan Opie (baritone)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor
Richard HickoxWorks
A Kent yeoman's wooing songHymnus Paradisi
Artists
Joan Rodgers (soprano)Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor)
Alan Opie (baritone)
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor
Richard HickoxAbout
The reputation of Herbert Howells has reached new heights in recent years, no doubt helped by recordings such as this one of Hymnus Paradisi. Howells wrote the work in memory of his young son Michael who had died of polio at the age of nine. It is not a conventional requiem, in that it does not contain the whole text of the Requiem Mass. Instead it sets Psalms 23 and 121 with ‘I heard a voice from heaven’ and words from the Salisbury Diurnal, ‘Holy is the True Light’. It is an intense and powerfully emotional work – the composer’s attempt to come to terms with personal tragedy.
BBC Music Magazine wrote of Hickox’s performance of Hymnus Paradisi: ‘[He] brings passionate commitment to his performance and shapes Howells’s long lines lovingly. He is aided by the fine playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and sensitive choral singing.’
The secular cantata A Kent Yeoman’s Wooing Song was intended as a wedding present for the baritone Keith Falkner and his bride, Christabel – although they had to wait two decades for the work to be presented to them. ‘No two people ever received a more delayed wedding present’, Howells wrote to them, adding that it came ‘with apologies and affection’.
The Wooing Song features Howells in an unusually extrovert mood, in music set to texts dating from the 1600s. Words from Thomas Vautor’s sprightly madrigal Mother, 'I will have a husband' (sung here by Joan Rodgers) provides the girl’s side of the story, while ‘I have House and Land in Kent’ (sung by Alan Opie), a text adapted from the composer Thomas Ravenscroft’s Melismata, gives the suitor’s perspective on courting.
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