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My Best Choral CD is from Hyperion and showcases music by the still underrated Herbert howells. Stephen Layton and his Trinity College Choir, Cambridge do wonders with Howells brief but eloquent Requiem, the Hymn to St Cecilia and one of our finest hymn tunes composed for All My Hope on God is Founded and dedicated to his son who died very young.
Reviewed by David MellorThe Mail on Sunday
The death from polio in 1935 of Herbert Howells' nine-year-old son Michael left a permanent mark on his music. Howells' most famous work Hymnus Paradisi was a memorial to his son that had its musical roots in the unaccompanied Requiem that he composed in the early 1930s, but which was only published just before his death in 1983. The Requiem, with its rather plain settings of Psalms 23 and 121...
Der englische Komponist Herbert Howells (1892-1983) war eine überaus interessante Persönlichkeit in der englischen Musiklandschaft, dessen Œuvre hierzulande leider viel zu selten beachtet wird. vielleicht weil sein umfangreiches Schaffen im Bereich der anglikanischen Kirchenmusik naturgemäß außerhalb des Einflussgebiets der anglikanischen Kirche weniger Interesse weckt. Dass dies eine äußerst...
Herbert Howells' Requiem must be one of the most beautiful and searingly moving works in the entire English sacred musical canon. Written in the early 30s but not released until 1980, it is inextricably linked to untimely youthful death; Howells modelled it on Walford Davies' A Short Requiem of 1915, written in memory of those killed in the war. Later, he drew heavily from it for Hymnus Paradisi...
I’d scarcely sent off my review of the fine recording of the Howells Requiem by Paul McCreesh than this new Hyperion disc arrived on my doormat. By an odd coincidence both works were recorded in the same venue: the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral. Interestingly, both recordings are produced by the same man, Adrian Peacock, though different engineers were employed on each project.
I’m not sure I’ve...
Herbert Howells (1892-1983) perfectly understood the way that liturgical music could stir the spirits. His two Services for Gloucester and St Paul’s Cathedrals, magnificently exploit ecclesiastical acoustics while bringing to the canticle texts a fluid lyrical gift, an imaginative harmonic spectrum and a sense of occasion. The disc takes ts title from the sparer, introspective Requiem, to which,...