Reviews & Articles

Tom Coxhead writes about his current post-graduate research into Kenneth Leighton’s mass settings. During my second year as an undergraduate at Durham, I worked on a project trying to make the case for classifying many British composers of the early twentiethcentury...

(An edited version of a talk given at the 2018 AGM of The Finzi Friends in Ashmansworth Church) I was at Leighton Park School in Reading, where, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Head of Music wasJohn Russell, a very great friend of the Finzis. I was originally a...

Gerald Finzi’s early years were blighted by loss. He lost his father when he was aged seven and his three brothers in the ensuing First World War; a terrible war in which Finzi also lost an important teacher and mentor in Ernest Farrar, who died on active service. An...

“Just the sort of melody I have wanted to do all my life and have never brought off.” (Ralph Vaughan Williams to Gerald Finzi on the central theme in Finzi’s Nocturne, op.7, 1935) While scholars have long recognized the importance of the so-called ‘English Musical...

This article is based upon a talk given at a joint meeting of Finzi Friends and the Ivor Gurney Society, at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Chosen Hill, Churchdown, on 3rd June 2017. Who is Ivor Gurney? — as an artist? Have we understood him? Indeed, how do we find and...

As I recently took my copy of Earth and Air and Rain off the shelf to revise it for a recital, I was struck by a number of things. Firstly, what a cracking section of my library the Finzi song category is! Secondly, how well-worn my copy is; it’s wonderful to revisit...

Consideration of texture and timbre in what is one of Gerald Finzi’s most distinctive works, and arguably one of his most popular, cannot fail to take into account previous or contemporary works in a similar genre. One of the most immediately apparent as a similar...

Introduction The case for Gerald Finzi’s For St Cecilia: Ceremonial Ode for tenor solo, chorus and orchestra, op.30 is succinctly stated by George Dannatt in the 1948 edition of the Penguin Music Magazine VII. He explains that the Daily Herald sponsored a Festival in...

The commission from the Finzi Trust to write a Gloria[i] and Nunc dimittis[ii] to accompany Finzi’s beautiful Magnificat[iii]for The Three Choirs Festival 2016 began with a telephone call from Robert Gower. I was hugely excited, honoured, and in all honesty, rather...

The Record Guide used to be the record collector's bible in the 1950s as the judgements of its editors, Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, came from the minds of two exceptionally intelligent musical writers.  Originally published in 1951, the aim of the...