Flowers of the Field
$25.00
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VAUGHAN WILLIAMS / BUTTERWORTH / GURNEY / FINZI
Flowers of the Field
Roderick Williams (baritone) & Jeremy Irons (speaker) / City of London Choir & London Mozart Players, Hilary Davan Wetton
[ Naxos / CD ]
Release Date: Saturday 20 December 2014
This item is currently out of stock. We expect to be able to supply it to you within 2 - 4 weeks from when you place your order.
These composers were all affected by the carnage of World War I, and their elegiac music expresses regret and lost innocence, love won and lost, sacrifice and death. George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad, conceived as an epilogue to his Housman song cycles, encapsulates the poet's sense of life's transience. Ivor Gurney was both shot and gassed in 1917, and The Trumpet pleads with mankind to set aside the folly of war. Heard here in a new completion, Gerald Finzi's Requiem da Camera mourns the death of his mentor
Ernest Farrar and those of other fallen artists, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's An Oxford Elegy recalls lost friends with an intense and magical nostalgia.
"this version [of the Requiem da Camera], intelligently paced by Hilary Davan Wetton with Roderick Williams as the matchless baritone soloist, is a significant addition to the Finzi catalogue...it's the Finzi especially that makes the disc so worthwhile." (Guardian)
"To mark Remembrance Day this disc collects works by English composers affected by the first world war. Unlike their compatriot poets, the composers responded with uniformly elegiac feelings." (Financial Times)
Tracks:
Butterworth, G:
A Shropshire Lad - Rhapsody
Finzi:
Requiem de Camera
World Première Recording
Gurney:
The Trumpet
Vaughan Williams:
An Oxford Elegy
