Hyperion Records | Finzi: Dies Natalis & Intimations

Click album cover to view larger version

Sunrise through Trees by Harold Hitchcock
Reproduced by kind permission of the artist / Private Collection

CDA66876

Recording details: February 1996
All Hallows, Gospel Oak, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Antony Howell & Julian Millard
Release date: October 1996
Total duration: 66 minutes 20 seconds

'The performance by tenor John Mark Ainsley and Corydon Singers weds the ecstatic to the sublime' (The New Yorker)

'Rich, glowing performances in a class apart' (BBC Music Magazine)

'With such ardent, beautiful singing that communicates deep respect for the music, it's a performance to treasure … [a] ravishingly poignant release' (Soundscapes, Australia)

'I shall treasure this recording' (Organists' Review)

'There have been several excellent previous recordings of Dies natalis but John Mark Ainsley's rendition is as fine as the best of them. This recent release is indispensable to the Finzi aficionado and highly recommended to all who enjoy the early twentieth-century English school of composers' (Fanfare, USA)

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)

Dies Natalis & Intimations

John Mark Ainsley (tenor), Corydon Singers, Matthew Best (conductor)

LISTEN TO ALL EXTRACTS

		Dies natalis, Op 8
1		Movement 1: Intrada [5'01] Corydon Orchestra
2		Movement 2: Rhapsody. Recitativo stromentato [6'31] Corydon Orchestra
3		Movement 3: The Rapture. Danza [3'35] Corydon Orchestra
4		Movement 4: Wonder. Arioso [4'23] Corydon Orchestra
5		Movement 5: The Salutation. Aria [4'37] Corydon Orchestra
		Intimations of Immortality, Op 29
6		Movement 01: Andante sostenuto [5'18] Corydon Orchestra
7		Movement 02: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream [3'25] Corydon Orchestra
8		Movement 03: The Rainbow comes and goes [2'28] Corydon Orchestra
9		Movement 04: Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song [4'22] Corydon Orchestra
10		Movement 05: Ye blessèd Creatures, I have heard the call [0'58] Corydon Orchestra
11		Movement 06: Oh evil day! if I were sullen [2'09] Corydon Orchestra
12		Movement 07: – But there's a Tree, of many, one [2'28] Corydon Orchestra
13		Movement 08: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting [3'42] Corydon Orchestra
14		Movement 09: Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own [1'49] Corydon Orchestra
15		Movement 10: O joy! that in our embers [3'06] Corydon Orchestra
16		Movement 11: But for those first affections [4'09] Corydon Orchestra
17		Movement 12: Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! [3'56] Corydon Orchestra
18		Movement 13: And O, ye fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves [4'23] Corydon Orchestra

This disc brings together two of Finzi’s most characteristic works. Dies Natalis, a setting of prose and verse by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne, is a piece of sublime concord and timelessness, music which vividly suggests the vision of a child’s innocence and unsullied perception of the world which lies at the heart of Traherne’s philosophy. Intimations of Immortality is by contrast a lament, not only for the lost joys of Traherne’s idealized childhood, but also for the severing of the adult soul from the intuitive primal stat. Finzi uses Wordsworth’s famous Ode to convey his view that ‘a dead poet lives in many a live stockbroke’ and the result is a work of arresting beauty.