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Herbert Howells may have been an Oxford man by education, but he came to forge his closest links with the 'other place': Cambridge. From 1941 to 1945 he was organist of St John's College while Robin Orr was on active service in the RAF, and his involvement in Cambridge's musical life continued when towards the end of the war he was asked by a select group led by Eric Milner-White to provide...
This is the second Howells disc that Stephen Layton and the Trinity College Choir have made for Hyperion and once again they have ventured out of Cambridge for the sessions. Their very fine disc that included the Requiem was set down variously in the Cathedrals of Lincoln and Ely. For this new disc, recorded three years later, they have gone even further afield, to the modern cathedral at...
Herbert Howells was arguably the most important composer of music for the Anglican church in the mid-twentieth century, and this selection has all of the polish and charisma to be expected from one of Britain’s most accomplished choral conductors, Stephen Layton, and his excellent Cambridge Choir, which now rivals the far more famous Kings College Choir in its achievements. Some of this stuff...
Those who have sung Howells's church music know how fluidly he matches it with text, how closely the cadences of words are reflected in the ebb and flow of notes on the stave. The Trinity College singers understand this, and a sense of their effortlessly catching the wave of Howells's inspiration suffuses these extremely fresh performances, nowhere more so than in the two Morning Canticles which...
This splendid disc brings together all of the Howells's 'Collegium Regale' music for the Morning and Evening Prayer and the Office of Holy Communion, composed for King's College, Cambridge, during the second world war and then a decade later. In addition, Stephen Layton offers us two early examples of Howells's Anglican chants(Psalms 121 and 122), the organ Rhapsody in D flat (sensitively played...
It was indeed fateful that Howells should have found himself in Cambridge during the Second World War in order to stand in for the recently appointed St John's College Organist Robin Orr, who was on active service in the RAF intelligence. Having contributed little of any significance to Anglican liturgical music for two decades, Howells found the renewed experience of choral services (one he had...