Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)
The Dance Continued
Nick Pritchard (tenor)
Ian Tindale (piano)
rec. 2026, New College Chapel, Holywell Street, Oxford, UK
Texts included
Signum Classics SIGCD1011 [71]
Two dates are significant here. This year is the 125th anniversary of Gerald Finzi’s birth and it’s 70 years since his too-early death in 1956. Thus, this disc refocuses attention on his songs by presenting three cycles – though only one is a true cycle as Till Earth Outwears and Oh Fair to See gather songs from a period of decades, in editions made by Howard Ferguson and Joy Finzi.
Collectors will know that James Gilchrist and Anna Tillbrook recorded all three sets for Linn twenty years ago and that John Mark Ainsley and Iain Burnside did likewise for Naxos. John Carol Case and Neil Jenkins have also made significant contributions on disc though neither overlaps what’s sung in this one.
Nick Pritchard is a very personable tenor, cut from strongly English cloth, and is both sensitive to word setting and to subtle projection. His voice is not as focused as that of Martyn Hill, who also recorded Finzi, with Clifford Benson (Till Earth Outwears, and A Young Man’s Exhortation, on Hyperion) but it is certainly sensitive.
Till Earth Outwears inevitably betrays its disparate origins but contains much beautiful writing. Pritchard’s floated tone in In years defaced is admirably done but I feel a slight want of wit and humour in The Market-Girl, sung straight, narrative style without any inflection. At a lunar eclipse is taken quite slowly. A Young Man’s Exhortation offers Finzi’s youthful lyricism in early flowering. Pritchard and Tindale are quite measured in Ditty but Budmouth Dears, a tricky song successfully to put across, causes Pritchard problems at its climax as indeed does Shortening Days, where the voice turns briefly pinched. The piano postlude in The Comet at Yell’ham is eloquently played. In The Sigh Finzi filches a cadence from Vaughan Williams’ Linden Lea. The dance continued is sensitively done.
Oh Fair to See is a warm-hearted, slightly uneven cycle culled from the years 1921-56. Only the wanderer can’t stand comparison with Ivor Gurney’s setting but there is a burnished quality – in both setting and performance – to As I lay in the early sun. And since we loved is as innocently lovely as ever.
Where this disc scores highly is in disinterring five songs from the Bodleian Library heard in world premiere recordings. They’re all early and so not characteristic, and mine a vein variously of Irishry, balladry, playfulness and the folkloric. Rondel is a setting of Chaucer and cleverly hints at antique piano cadences without descending to pastiche. Of the five, the most significant, in terms of Finzi’s musical development, is English Hills, where one feels him exploring late-Romanticism and paying particular attention to dappled piano writing.
This is an attractive Finzi recital, finely documented and with full texts, in English only.
Jonathan Woolf
Other review: John Quinn
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Contents
Till Earth Outwears, Op.19a (1927-56)
A Young Man’s Exhortation, Op.14 (1926-29)
Oh Fair to See, Op.13b (1921-56)
Days Too Short (1925)
A Cradle Song (1919)
The Terrible Robber Men (1920)
Rondel (1920)
English Hills (1922-25)
