There are two popular settings of Christina Rossetti’s In the bleak mid-winter—Gustav Holst’s, which appears in the standard hymnals and carol collections, and the present one by Harold Darke (1888–1976). Darke, like several other composers represented on this disc, was a product of the Royal College of Music, studying composition with Stanford and the organ with Sir Walter Parratt, who had himself been a church organist from the age of eleven. Darke held the post of organist and choirmaster of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, for fifty years from 1916, except for a wartime break when he stood in at King’s College, Cambridge, from 1941 to 1945. He founded the St Michael’s Singers and was an organ professor at the RCM from 1919 until 1969, by which time he was well past his eightieth birthday. Darke’s more substantial compositions include the cantatas Ring out, ye crystal spheres and An Hymn of Heavenly Beauty.

from notes by Wadham Sutton © 1993