Finzi Friends Day – Saturday 4th July 2026, 3pm

St Nicholas Church, Newbury

Finzi Friends will gather in Ashmansworth and Newbury on 4 July 2026 for a special day marking the 70th anniversary of the death of Gerald Finzi, and dedicated to the memory of the distinguished Finzi scholar Diana McVeagh.

The day begins in the morning at St James’s Church, Ashmansworth, with a talk on Finzi by musicologist Dr Matthew McCullough, a specialist in twentieth century British music and co-editor of the recently published Music, Mortality, and Memory. Matt is known to Finzi Friends through his contribution to the 2021 Journal. This will be followed by a relaxed bring-your-own lunch in the Village Hall with tea and coffee provided.

In the afternoon, the celebration continues with a Finzi concert at St Nicolas’ Church, Newbury, featuring the Reading Bach Choir, Jonathan Eyers (baritone) and Janet Hilton (clarinet) with Gavin Roberts (piano). Music includes the Seven Partsongs of Robert Bridges; the Bagatelles for clarinet and piano; and songs from Earth and Air and Rain

Schedule

11am Morning Event – Ashmansworth
St James’s Church, Ashmansworth (a chance to view the Finzi memorial window)
Talk by Dr Matt McCulloch
Bring-your-own lunch afterwards in the Village Hall
 
3pm Afternoon Concert – Newbury
St Nicolas’ Church, Newbury

Reading Bach Choir (Nicholas Shaw – conductor)
Jonathan Eyers – baritone (winning singer in the inaugural Rebecca Clarke Song Competition 2026) 
Janet Hilton – clarinet
Gavin Roberts – piano

Tickets

Morning Talk – FREE (booking requested)
St James’s Church, Ashmansworth
Admission is free, but please reserve a ticket so that we can estimate numbers.
 
Afternoon Concert – £25
St Nicolas’ Church, Newbury
 
Tickets will be available from tickettailor here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/finzifriends1/2101096

The Prophetic Bird: An Aviary in Song

Sunday 21st September 2025

We enjoyed a very fine recital at St Nicholas, Chiswick, masterminded by our music consultant, Gavin Roberts. One of Gavin’s many strengths is his knack of finding just the right performers to reflect the finest qualities of Finzi’s music. On this occasion, these were projected in the context of songs by a wide range of 20^th and 21^st century composers, all grouped around the broad topic of birds, fashioned into a journey through the seasons. The fine singing of Lucy Goddard, mezzo-soprano and Jon Stainsby, baritone was matched with Gavin’s customarily brilliant piano playing. This was a concert where the sense of the texts of the songs was strongly projected as much as the music, something surely close to Finzi’s heart. We were delighted to be able to welcome ‘local’ composer, Cecilia McDowall to the concert as well as many customary attendees of St Nicholas’ own Sunday afternoon concert series. Once again, joining with an established concert-giving group ensured our aim to promote Finzi’s music was strongly promoted. A good-size audience enjoyed captivating singing and playing in a fine building, with the Thames running swiftly outside.

Gavin Roberts accompanies Jon Stainsby and Lucy Goddard during the performance

(Above) Lucy, Jon and Gavin receive the applause of the audience after the performance

(Left) Vice Chairman Paul Ives talking with Cecilia McDowall after the concert

For those unable to be present, Jon Stainsby’s thought-provoking programme notes provide a strong flavour of the recital. We are grateful to Jon for allowing us to share the notes in print:

From Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, via Keats’s nightingale, Shelley’s skylark and Coleridge’s albatross, to Ted Hughes’s Crow, the history of English poetry is richly populated with poems about birds. Indeed, the editors of a recent anthology of The Poetry of Birds in English remark that it would be hard to identify a poet who hasn’t written a poem on an avian theme. It’s therefore hardly surprising that composers setting English texts to music have contributed a veritable aviary to the English song tradition, one which might easily stand comparison with Brahms’s nightingales, Schubert’s eerie crow, or the miscellaneous avifauna of Ravel’s Histoires Naturelles. The proximity of today’s venue to the London Wetland Centre – under a mile away, as the proverbial crow flies – served as the initial inspiration for today’s programme. But while our recital does include a handful of settings of obvious “bird poems,” we have mostly taken a more elliptical, slantwise flight path, choosing settings of poems in which birds make a brief, flying visit, while the poet’s main focus of attention is elsewhere. Of course, some true “bird poems” were irresistible, most notably Thomas Hardy’s ‘Proud Songsters,’ which proved so attractive that we have included it twice, in the very different settings by Benjamin Britten and Gerald Finzi. But even here, the poet’s true subject is not only the thrushes, finches and nightingales he observes, but the thoughts that they inspire about the cycle of the year and the elemental process of rebirth and renewal. Our programme’s loose organising principle, then, is the cycle of the seasons and the ways in which human experience of seasonal change is marked and mediated by avian migrations and activities. If the birds themselves sometimes make only the briefest of appearances, that seems to be an accurate reflection of the ways in which most of us – bar the most obsessive of twitchers – tend to experience the peripheral but ubiquitous presence of birds in our daily lives.

Our programme is also, of course, a tribute to Gerald Finzi and his circle – his personal and professional relationships with Robin Milford, Edmund Rubbra and Herbert Howells, and his championing of the work of Ivor Gurney – and we present seven of his songs along with one duet. These include settings of Christina Rossetti, of Edward Shanks and of Shakespeare – one of two settings of Elizabethan poets in our programme, the other being Gurney’s setting of ‘Spring’ by Thomas Nashe – but the majority are settings of Thomas Hardy, the poet whom Finzi set more than any other. Hardy wrote a number of obvious “bird poems,” of which ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (represented here in a setting by Judith Weir) is perhaps the best known; but it is intriguing to note that, with the arguable exception of ‘Proud Songsters,’ these were not typically the poems that Finzi was drawn to. Instead, his Hardy settings tend to exemplify our theme of poems in which the poet briefly takes notice of the presence of birds, while his attention is focused on matters closer to home. Very often, in fact, it is precisely the act of noticing, or not noticing, that is Hardy’s real subject in these poems: in ‘Before and After Summer,’ it is the presence of a mute bird in shadow that prompts the poet’s thought that he has failed to register the passing of the summer season, while in ‘Overlooking the River,’ he regrets that his attention has been focused on the activities of swallows and moorhens, to the exclusion of unnamed, more pressing domestic concerns. Even in ‘Summer Schemes,’ Hardy’s rapturous experience of the ‘quavers, minims, shakes and trills’ of the ‘little fifers’ he and his companion hear as they respond instinctively to the new season (given unforgettable expression in the twittering figuration of Finzi’s piano writing) is tempered by the heart-stopping recognition of his uncertainty about the future, what it may hold, and who will be there to sing about it. For Hardy, as for Finzi, it seems that the experience of the presence of birds is always an ambivalent one.

Needless to say, Finzi’s ‘Summer Schemes’ is not the only song here that gives musical expression in voice and piano to the singing of birds. Gurney and Nashe collaborate across the centuries to give onomatopoeic voice to the timeless songs of cuckoo, nightingale, lapwing, and owl; while the nightingale’s song returns in the piano part of Herbert Howells’s ‘King David,’ one of two settings of Walter de la Mare in our programme that feature biblical birdsong. Howells also wrote a beautiful setting of Shelley’s ‘A Widow Bird sate mourning,’ but we have opted instead to perform the setting of the same poem by the neglected composer (and friend of both Finzi and Howells) Edmund Rubbra. Biblical or spiritual frames of reference return in ‘Angel Radar’ by Cecilia McDowall, a setting of a poem by Seán Street, the author of a book-length study of “the idea of birdsong” in the time before the advent of recording technologies. Cecilia McDowall is one of three composers we have included in our programme as a corrective to the conventional assumption that the English song tradition of Finzi, Gurney, Howells and Vaughan Williams is a more or less exclusively male preserve. Imogen Holst’s significance in the history of twentieth-century English music is gaining increasing recognition, and she is represented here by a fresh and pithy setting of Thomas Hardy. More recently, the repertoire of English song has been immeasurably enriched by the work of the Scottish composer Judith Weir, whose deft and brilliant writing for voice is encapsulated in her superb short cycle The Voice of Desire. Today’s recital includes three of these wise and witty songs, which draw on strikingly diverse sources to give voice not so much to human encounters with birds as to the birds’ encounters with humans. In Weir’s aviary, Robert Bridges’s nightingales pour their ‘dark nocturnal secret’ into the ears of men, while the cuckoos and coucals of African folk poetry both inspire and pass judgement on the darkest and most destructive of human activity. In ‘Written on Terrestrial Things,’ meanwhile, Weir returns us to Thomas Hardy – but a very different Hardy, perhaps, from the poet who seems so familiar to Finzi and his devotees, sensing but not grasping the thrush’s ‘blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.’ Notes by Jon Stainsby

We are particularly grateful to Heather Johnson, who runs the Chiswick series for her help, together with Ann McBride, and for providing a very tasty chocolate cake. Our thanks to Fr Simon Brandes and everyone at St Nicholas for making us so welcome – we very much hope to return!

You can buy a copy of Diana’s book by clicking on this link: Buy Finzi Letters

Artist: Milein Cosman

There is no room in the world, as you say, for second rate work.

Gerald Finzi

There is no room in the world, as you say, for second rate work.

Gerald Finzi