What an interesting message, we can always rely on Larry to come up with
something good!

Rebecca Carke was yet another of Charles Stanford's pupils, as was
her later husband, the pianist/composer James Friskin.  Stanford's
constant presence as a teacher rests not so much in his composing talents
(though Vaughan Williams was to praise him as a teacher) but in the
simple fact that he was composition teacher at the Royal College of Music
and at Cambridge, where everyone went.  Stanford didn't like the idea
of education for women and thought they should be denied places in
university on the logic that universities equipped men for voting rights
and careers in law, theology and medecine which were banned to women!
Still, when women were admitted, he taught four, another being Marion
Scott, later to win fame as a music writer and champion of Ivor Gurney,
another Stanford pupil, who Stanford described as both the most original
and the most unteachable of his students, but potentially the best of
them all.  Though personally I would have thought it was Vaughan Williams:-)

Herbert Howells was another near contemporary, indeed, Howells, Gurney
and none other than Ivor Novello, later to write popular songs, were
youthful friends.  Howells was in awe of the more eccentric and complex
Gurney, who was gassed in the war and whose career was overtaken by
mental illness.  Together they would ramble aound the counryside, talking
music and poetry.  Their favourite spot was a place called Chosen Hill
near Gloucester, one of those places where some sort of karma seems to
inspire artists.  Howell's piano quartet is subtitled "To the Hill of
Chosen and Ivor Gurney who knows it", a fresh and spontaneous btune,
quite different tonthe choral work.  Chosen Hill was also crucial to
Gerald Finzi.  Here, at New Year in 1925 he was inspired by a beautiful
starlit sky to write his Nocturne.  Years later as he was terminally ill
with cancer he and Vaughan Williams went back to Chosen Hill and found
the cottage where Finzi had found his Damascus.  Finzi caught some bug
from the cottager's children and died 3 weeks later.

As Steve Schwartz says, Paul Spicer and the Finzi Singers are the royalty
of British music, and any recording by them is sure to have an interesting
approach.  Spicer in fact literally wrote the book on Howells!

Anne
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