Continue the journey…
We suggest five more works to explore after Parry’s Songs of Farewell
His Songs of Farewell aside, recordings of Parry’s works for unaccompanied choir are surprising by their general absence. Head instead, then, for his Blest Pair of Sirens, the uplifting anthem for choir and orchestra (or, more often today, organ) that put him firmly on the choral map at his first performance in 1887. (Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge/ Andrew Nethsingha; Glen Dempsey (organ) Signum SIGCD567).
Parry’s list of students at the Royal College of Music reads almost like a who’s who of early-20th-century British composing talent. One of them was Frank Bridge, who was at the very start of his career when he wrote his a cappella anthems Autumn and Music When Soft Voices Die in 1903-4. Setting texts by Shelley, both works – as their titles suggest – have an evocative, elegiac quality that foreshadows the Songs of Farewell. (Tenebrae/nigel Short Signum SIGCD904).
When Parry died in 1918, the loss was particularly keenly felt by his colleague and friend CV Stanford (above), with whom he had only recently patched up a bitter rift.
Stanford, who in earlier times had been unstinting in his praise for Parry’s talents, now paid tribute to him with his Latin Magnificat for eight-part choir, dedicating it ‘to his name in grief’. (Trinity College Choir, Cambridge/stephen Layton Hyperion CDA68174).
Parry’s music was also championed by Gerald
Finzi, who was similarly affected by the loss of friends in World War I. Setting words by the Scottish poet William Drummond, his beautifully concise Three Short Elegies Op. 5 of 1926 give an early hint of the choral brilliance to come. (Finzi Singers/paul Spicer Chandos CHAN 8936).
We round off with another Parry student: Herbert Howells, who in 1964 was commissioned to compose an unaccompanied anthem for a memorial service for President Kennedy. The resulting Take Him Earth for Cherishing sets words by Prudentius and shows Howells at his harmonically inventive best, its contemplative mood broken by the occasional impassioned outbursts of a composer still grieving the loss of his own son, Michael. (The Sixteen/harry Christophers Coro COR16134).
Stanford dedicated his Magnificat for eight-part choir to Parry ‘in grief’