Francis Pott’s Amore langueo is a large-scale work for unaccompanied double choir and solo vocal quartet. It sets a fifteenth-century English lyric with a Latin refrain—indeed the refrain ‘Amore langueo’ (‘I am faint with love’) underlies the majority of the music in the piece. In terms of its scoring there are obvious English precursors from the beginning of the twentieth century in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (for double string orchestra and string quartet) and Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor (also for double choir and solo vocal quartet). However, although the undulating harmonies of Amore langueo frequently share more in common with the music of Arnold Bax and E J Moeran than with Vaughan Williams, there is a clarity and transparency about the music that Pott gives to the solo quartet in particular that binds this intricate setting to some of the most simple and directly affecting English music of the twentieth century.
from notes by Jeremy Summerly © 2006
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