Bob Summers wrote:

>The following was written by our Program Annotator Steven Ledbetter:
>
>"Finzi conducted the premiere of the Clarinet Concerto at the Three
>Choirs Festival in Hereford on September 9, 1949, with the London
>Symphony Orchestra and Frederick Thomas as the soloist."

Before my time, of course, but I understand the solo clarinet was Frederick
Thurston, for whom the piece was written, not Frederick Thomas.

>"Like much of Finzi's music, it evokes the transitory nature of life ...
>Subtle understatement of his work, the mingling of poignant sadness, and a
>rapt appreciation of beauty infuse this work from the beginning to end."
>
>Many audience members familiar with Finzi informed me that his choral
>works are magnificent.
>
>Any suggestions or recommendations for recordings of his Choral pieces?

I wouldn't lump the choral works together as magnificent, partly because
the several works are rather different from each other, but mainly because
the comment about the "subtle understatement ...  the mingling of poignant
sadness, and a rapt appreciation of beauty" often applies to Finzi's choral
works also.  Magnificent English choral music of the time suggests the
school of Parry, Elgar, even perhaps Sir Arthur Somervell -- but Finzi's
is quite a different voice.  Pace Professor Chasan, I would rate Finzi's
setting of Wordsworth's Ode On Intimations Of Immortality From
Recollections Of Early Childhood up there among his best works.  I mention
Somervell only because he also made a setting of the 'Immortality Ode'
(1907), similar in scope and forces to Finzi's (1950).

Not that I don't have certain problems with the Finzi, however.  For one
thing, Finzi has cut two stanzas from Wordsworth's final version of the Ode
- stanzas which are placed centrally in the poem and are indeed central to
Wordsworth's thesis, which is actually more concerned with earthly life
than with immortality.  Probably inspired by Coleridge's young son Hartley
("A six years' Darling of a pygmy size"), the missing stanzas refer to The
Child, whom Wordsworth in one of them calls

     Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
     On whom those truths do rest,
     Which we are toiling all our lives to find ...

Hardly peripheral, then.  Of course the relationship between the poet and
the composer who sets his work has often been difficult.  The way composers
repeat lines or make cuts has angered poets, and Housman was particularly
incensed, I think, by his treatment at the hands of RVW.  Finzi may also
have felt daunted by Wordsworth (as well he might), as Schubert was by
Goethe.  Of course we can only speculate as to what Wordsworth would have
made of it.  Certainly Finzi's setting had a very long gestation, and
orchestral parts were still being copied out the day before the first
performance (5 September 1950), though the work had been first conceived
some twenty-five years earlier, and must therefore have been with him
for the greater part of his creative life and, as his wife Joy attested,
certainly throughout the whole of his married life.  (At his civil wedding
ceremony in 1933 the only witnesses were Ralph and Adeline Vaughan
Williams, and the score of 'Intimations of Immortality' carries a
dedication to Adeline.)

Intimations of Immortality is for tenor solo, mixed chorus, and orchestra
and runs for, I suppose, about 40 minutes.  It is indeed lyrical, elegiac,
poignant, all of that, but that is not all there is to Wordsworth's great
poem, and Finzi adds some insights which enhance the text and which also
complement the Ode's final premise, that we exist on levels that are much
deeper than our feelings and emotions.  Reading the poem is already a
musical experience, and Finzi adds to that in various ways.  For example,
the big ritardando-crescendo and fermata he writes on "Shout round me, let
me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy!", coming as it does after the
jolly dancing dotted rhythms of the earlier part of the third stanza, adds
a completely new dimension to the meaning of those apparently simple lines.

Wordsworth's poem already uses 'musical' techniques of exposition,
development, and recapitulation, which Finzi mirrors in a subtle and
masterly way.  The poetic and musical argument of this Song of Experience
comes to a quietly radiant life-affirming close when it speaks of

 an eye
        That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
        Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Then the final quatrain ("Thanks to the human heart ...") is treated as a
coda, a sort of chorus mysticus, with the tenor as the poet and the chorus
representing humanity.  Finzi's coda is deeply quiet and thoughtful, yet
curiously not sombre, expressing resolution without complacency, raising
more questions even as it suggests answers.

Although this would presumably be catalogued among the choral works, and
the chorus does have a significant role, I don't regard this as a 'choral
work' so much as something that is essentially art-song.

I recently heard a fine performance by Philip Langridge, with Richard
Hickox and the LSO.  They also gave another Finzi 'choral work', the
ceremonial ode For St Cecilia, which is not at all in the same league.

I can certainly recommend Finzi's 'Intimations of Immortality', but
recommend that you brush up your Wordsworth and study the complete poem
first, even if like me you were made to memorise it when you were too young
to understand it, but have never forgotten it.  As for recordings, there is
one by Langridge / Hickox on EMI, but I haven't heard it.

Alan Moss