At the end of September, Stephen Cleobury will retire as director of music at King’s College, Cambridge. He’s been in charge of Britain’s best-known choir for 37 years, and among his many innovations there has been the creation of the choir’s own recording label, five years ago. The final release before his departure is this double album of music by Herbert Howells, an appropriate choice as Cleobury has recently become president of the Herbert Howells Society.
Though Howells’s music has been dismissed as a pale imitation of Vaughan Williams, and does sometimes epitomise that rather anodyne mid 20th-century British tradition, none of his major choral pieces – Hymnus Paradisi, Missa Sabrinensis or An English Mass, from 1956, which is the main work in this collection – conforms to that image. All three are very personal statements, which generally avoid the usual platitudes of Anglican liturgical music, and with its sombre, dark colouring, An English Mass in particular seems to project a troubled, constantly questioning attitude to faith, and never becomes a blazing affirmation of it.
If the other choral works here – a Te Deum, and the Collegium Regale Magnificat – are less distinctive, then the Cello Concerto is a more interesting piece, which Howells was working on when his son died suddenly from polio in 1936. Only the first two movements were finished, and the finale was left in sketch form; what Guy Johnston plays with the Britten Sinfonia is a completion and orchestration by Jonathan Clinch, music that’s clearly indebted to Vaughan Williams, but at the same time retains its own distinctive voice.
All of the works were recorded in the warmly resonant King’s College Chapel, with Cleobury conducting the beautifully shaped choral performances; illness prevented him taking charge of the Cello Concerto sessions, which his friend Christopher Seaman took over instead. It’s altogether a fine collection of unfamiliar music.
Also out this week
Baritone Marcus Farnsworth’s performance of By Footpath and Stile, the earliest settings of Thomas Hardy by Howells’s close friend Gerald Finzi, dates back to 2012. Then it was released by Resonus just as a digital download, but now it has made it to disc, together with the other Finzi works from the original collection with the Finzi Quartet, including a string-quartet arrangement of the Romance for Strings, and the clarinet Bagatelles with quartet rather than piano accompaniment. Though Roderick Williams’s performance for Naxos on what was then the first ever recording of By Footpath and Stile, remains unsurpassed, Farnsworth’s version is certainly a viable alternative for a work that may not be one of Finzi’s best, but points towards the great Hardy songs to come.
