A faithful yet fresh performance
The Rodolfus Choir
Ralph Allwood (conductor)
Herald HAVPCD 217 The 2018 centenary of Parry’s death brought several new recordings of the Songs of Farewell, and the overall quality of the performances currently available is very high. Despite such exceptional competition, however, this 1998 version by the Rodolfus Choir, alumni of the
Eton Choral Courses of that era, stands out through the wonderful balance it achieves between text and music. Fidelity to the score and performance instructions is absolute, yet there is a real sense of immediacy and freshness.
Every word is clear; every phrase is beautifully shaped and controlled. An impressive momentum is sustained through each piece and from beginning to end of the entire sequence as the choir exemplifies to perfection composer and conductor Imogen Holst’s dictum that the silences in a part-song ‘must never give the impression that the sound has been switched off… the silence should feel like a pause in a rubato; it is part of the continuous flow of the rhythm’. The magical section around ‘Eternal be the sleep’ in ‘There is an old belief’ is a striking example of this, where conductor Ralph Allwood pulls the tempo right back almost to a stop, yet the listener can still sense where the piece is going. (By contrast, the
Chapel Choir of Exeter College, Oxford, does not manage this so well in their 2015 recording, although they have a similarly fresh, appealing sound.)
The Rodolfus Choir’s tenors and basses are particularly adept, demonstrating a fabulous range of colour and expression. Admittedly, a slight imbalance with the less powerful upper voices is apparent in the earlier songs; yet when the choir splits into seven and then eight parts for the final two pieces there is no loss of confidence and the balance works well, especially in the ‘blow your trumpets, angels’ section of ‘At the round earth’s imagin’d corners’,
Impressive momentum is sustained from beginning to end of the sequence
where the choir’s gloriously homogenous sound is reminiscent of a perfectly weighted pendulum.
Despite their youth, the ‘Rods’ seem to bring a real sense of understanding to ‘Lord, let me know mine end’, and the concluding pages are transcendental in their beauty and intensity. Recorded in the gorgeous acoustic of Douai
Abbey, Berkshire, the icing on the cake is the inclusion on the same album of infrequently sung part-songs including How sweet the answer and Tell Me, O Love. Rarely, in fact, have the unaccompanied choral works of Parry fared so well.