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 [log in to unmask]