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