Charles Wood resided for most of his life in Cambridge where he was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and director of chapel music there. Published in 1915, the rousing O thou, the central orb sets words by the Oxford clergyman and hymnologist Henry Ramsden Bramley, who wrote his Petrarchian sonnet at the behest of Sir Frederick Ouseley so it could be used as a new text for Orlando Gibbons’s 1619 anthem O all true faithful hearts. Wood adopted an uncomplicated ternary form for his interpretation of the poem, the outer sections deploying a muscular diatonicism in A flat major, while the central paragraph explores a wider range of tonalities with excursions to F minor, D flat and C flat major.

from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 2025