Finzi: Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice, Op. 26

A substantial programme of sacred choral music by Gerald Finzi and Gustav Holst, sung by the Winchester Cathedral Girls’ Choir and the Lay Clerks in the third recording on Regent from Winchester Cathedral.

Included here are most of the sacred choral works by both composers suitable for liturgical use, and features not only well-known works such as God is gone up and Lo, the full, final sacrifice by Finzi, and the exquisite unaccompanied eight-part Nunc dimittis by Holst, but also a number of rarely-heard or recorded works by both composers.

Recorded in the glorious acoustics of Winchester Cathedral by one of the world’s finest cathedral girls’ choirs.

One of the most popular and versatile chamber choirs in the UK, the Vasari Singers have thrived for over thirty years, delighting audiences and critics with their passion, sensitivity and ethos of excellence – “one of the finest small choral groups of our time” Gramophone. This disc celebrates some of the great anthems by 19th- and 20thcentury British composers. They are masterful works, and a mainstay of church and cathedral choral repertoire.

EVENSONG - sung day after day in the collegiate chapels and cathedrals of Great Britain - is an irreplaceable jewel in our cultural landscape. For centuries it has been enriched with an unparalleled repertory of settings and anthems. offering a unique environment of words and music, of celebration and reflection, of aesthetic fulfilment and prayer. In this recording, New College celebrates its medieval founder, William of Wykeham ,whose statutes for New College established a benchmark for the establishment of choral foundations throughout the country. At New College, the listener is in touch with the roots of the English choral tradition, as vigorous and enterprising in the twenty-first century as it was at the end of the fourteenth.

The works on In the Beginning were all written in the shadow or the aftermath of World War II, and unite composers of three nationalities who shared a gift of marrying melody to poetry. Finzi’s Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice, written in 1946, was the composer’s longest single stretch of music he had so far attempted, and also his first attempt at writing for organ. The Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti eschewed the modernist trends of his colleagues; his Tre composizioni corali, from 1942-43, are informed by his immersion in Renaissance polyphony and profound Christianity. Britten’s influential Rejoice in the Lamb was written in 1943 shortly after his return to the UK from America, where he met Aaron Copland, whose In the Beginning, a setting of the complete first chapter of the book of Genesis and much of the second from the King James Bible, concludes the disc. As the successor to the boys and monks of the Benedictine Abbey, The Gloucester Cathedral Choir boasts a tradition tracing back over 900 years. Henry VIII established their current incarnation, along with the Church of England, in 1539. Andrew Nethsingha, the choir’s Music Director at the time of this recording, was a chorister at Exeter Cathedral, where his father, the distinguished Sri Lankan-born English church musician Lucian Nethsingha, was director of music for 26 years. He studied at the Royal College of Music where he was awarded seven prizes and was the youngest cathedral organist in Britain when appointed to Truro Cathedral in 1994. In addition to singing in six services every week, the Gloucester Cathedral Choir is heard annually at the Three Choirs Festival, and regularly at the Cheltenham International Festival and on BBC radio and television broadcasts.