Reviews
BBC Music Magazine Christmas 2009 issue
The gem here is Finzi's In terra pax, a 16-minute 'Christmas scene' for choir, two soloists and orchestra, merging Bridge's poetry with St Luke's gospel. From late in Finzi's life, it is suffused with English pastoral yearning, and baritone Roderick Williams sings beautifully in the outer sections. Of similar proportions, if expressively less intense, is the 'Winter' section of Vaughan Williams's Folk Songs of the Four Seasons, four colourfully scored settings which find the women of the City of London Choir in fulsomely committed voice. Leighton's unaccompanied 'A Hymn of the Nativity' is another stand-out item in this valuable anthology.
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Classic FM Magazine Christmas 2009 issue
(Four and a half Stars)
Top Seasonal Treats
Christmas Crackers
Charlotte Gardner helps you choose your soundtrack to the festive season with a round-up of new Christmas releases:
The advantage of magazine deadlines requiring Christmas disc reviews be written in October is that one's professional judgement hasn't yet been clouded by happy festive fluffiness. Au contraire, one assumes a Scrooge-like mercilessness when distinguishing the musical Turkish delights from the hopeless turkeys. This year, wonderful surprises shine out from amongst the predictable, the mediocre and frankly depressing.
Classic FM's resident composer Howard Goodall is fast carving out a position alongside John Rutter as the nation's favourite sacred music composer. His Enchanted Carols elegantly achieves universal accessibility without drifting into banality. However, this year's Christmas goose-bump offering is undoubtedly In Terra Pax. The title track by Finzi and Holst's Christmas Day are just two of the largely forgotten 20th century British works on this great disc. Delivered in a performance awash with yuletide spirit, they still scream nostalgic familiarity thanks to their Christmassy modal harmonies, plus occasional echoes and re-workings of popular carols. ....
Familiar-sounding while still ticking the "something different" box. A welcome resurrection of under-performed British gems, sung and played with great warmth.
Charlotte Gardner
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Daily Mail Friday 4 December 2009
(Four Stars)
That a mixed choir can challenge our great boys' choirs at Christmas is proved by this enterprising anthology. It sweeps up a lot of highly enjoyable music by the pick of 20th-century British composers (and South African-born John Joubert). Joubert's unaccompanied There is No Rose is one of the best things brought to us by the City of London Choir under Hilary Davan Wetton. The title piece, by Finzi, has the suave-toned baritone Roderick Williams as soloist.
Tully Potter
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Daily Telegraph Saturday, 5th December 2009
In Terra Pax; a Christmas Anthology
Classical CD Choice
This enchanting disc delves widely and deeply into the repertoire of English Christmas music and comes up with some rewarding finds among some other items that have become staples. In the latter category such miniatures as Howell's A Spotless Rose, John Joubert's There is no Rose and John Gardner's Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day are all, deservedly, timeless classics, and all are performed here by the City of London Choir with freshness, bloom, attentive diction and a palpable heart.
But the core of the CD lies in several more substantial reflections on the Christmas story, with Kenneth Leighton's contemplative A Hymn of the Nativity and, at the disc's very centre, Gerald Finzi's beautifully nostalgic – but by no means sentimental – In Terra Pax.
This, with sensitive, lyrical solists in Julia Doyle and Roderick Williams, takes its texts from the poetry of Robert Bridges (which inspires Finzi to quiet, introspective thoughts) and from St Luke's Gospel, which generates more vibrant choral activity.
Holst's joyful medley Christmas Day and Vaughan Williams's compendium of carols in Winter deploy a spry Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Hilary Davan Wetton throughout draws a winning spectrum of expression from his forces, be it voiced pensively or festively.
Geoffrey Norris
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Financial Times Saturday 5 December 2009
(Four Stars)
Christmas anthologies usually have me running for the exit but this is a cut above the rest. Named after Finzi's ultra-English vision of peace on earth, it's a welcome reminder that British composers of the past 100 years have seen Christmas more as a source of inspiration than a way of exploiting a gullible market. Finzi wrote In terra pax late in life. With a text mingling Robert Bridges and St Luke, it recalls an experience he had when young, of hearing bells ringing out over the Cotswolds on a frosty Christmas Eve. The music, capturing a sense of celestial wonder amid the pastoral lyricism, is splendidly brought to life by the excellent City of London Choir and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, with soprano Julia Doyle and baritone Roderick Williams. The best of the rest – carols by Holst, Rutter, Vaughan Williams, Warlock – is Howell's Here is the Little Door.
Andrew Clark
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The Guardian Friday 4 December
(Four Stars)
What seems at first glance like yet another of the Christmas anthologies that surface regularly at this time of year turns out to include an outstanding account of one of the minor masterpieces of 20th-century English music. Completed in 1956, In Terra Pax is Gerald Finzi's reflection on the Christmas story, using extracts from St Luke's gospel and a poem by Robert Bridges to reimagine the nativity to the English countryside, with shepherds abiding in the fields of the Cotswolds. It's beautifully done, the texts set with all Finzi's skill as a songwriter and scored with perfect understatement to create a memory of childhood that is at the same time both visionary and profoundly nostalgic, qualities that the performance under Hilary Davan Wetton captures perfectly. The rest of the disc is equally well sung, though nothing else – not Holst's pot-pourri of familiar carols in recently rediscovered Christmas Day, Vaughan Williams's rather twee arrangements in Folk Songs of the Four Seasons: Winter, nor any of carols by composers such as Howells, Joubert, Mathias and Warlock – comes close to matching Finzi's distinctive and exquisitely poetic world.
Andrew Clements
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Gramaphone
Extract from Gramophone, December 2009 issue, entitled Merry Music
‘Another amateur choir, the City of London Chorus [sic], joins the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Hilary Davan Wetton for a disc of larger-scale works by Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Warlock and Holst, and a host of miniatures by other British composers. Mathias is here again, represented by both A babe is born and Sir Christèmas; so is Howells, Here is the little door making a welcome prelude to the ubiquitous A spotless rose; so is Gardner, with Ben Glassberg starring as the tambourinist in Tomorrow shall be my dancing day. The centrepiece, though, is Finzi's ‘Christmas scene’ In terra pax, which finds choir, orchestra and soloists Julia Doyle and Roderick Williams on fine form, and shows how a rationalist agnostic such as Finzi (who was Jewish of German-Italian descent) is not excluded from creating a personal and moving mystery. Holst (Christmas Day), Warlock (Three Carols) and VW (the Winter selection of Folk Songs of the Four Seasons) manage through their skill and taste not to descend into rum-ti-tum Christmas doggerel, and the latter's God bless the master forms a fittingly climactic close to an elegant concert programme.’
David Threasher
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International Record Review December 2009 issue
Part of a review feature entitled:
Christmas comes but once a year
Then there's 'In Terra Pax – A Christmas Anthology' with Julia Doyle and Roderick Williams, with Hilary Davan Wetton conducting the City of London Choir and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Has Finzi's In terra pax been done better on disc? Williams is a deeply sympathetic soloist and Davan Wetton finds that unique blend of the eternal and the everyday that walks through Finzi's most accomplished scores. You can almost forgive Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day yet again when Doyle makes such a rich dish of three carols by Peter Warlock. Strange musical ingredients, as one expects from this composer, but blended with consummate artistry.
Christopher Cook
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Liverpool Daily Post 20 November 2009
Classical Music: A marvellous fantasy of Christmas music
ENGLISH Christmas music began in 1918. That may be a slight exaggeration to be found in a programme note by John Allison in a new anthology called in Terra Pax, but it is largely true. In medieval times, carols were supplanted by chant, and Cromwell banned them altogether – indeed, even Christmas was outlawed at one time by Parliamentary decree. Festivity was out. Carols survived like folk music only in remote rural communities.
Christmas music looked up in Britain with the arrival at Prince Albert’s behest of the Christmas Tree in the 19th century and that was followed by European carols which have become the core of our musical Christmas – Hark the Herald Angels and In Dulci Jubilo from Germany, Silent Night from Austria and Adeste Fideles from Italy.
England started to look up with the publication in 1906 of The English Hymnal, edited by Vaughan Williams, and took a real step forward with the establishment, at the suggestion of the Bishop of Truro, of The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols by King’s College, Cambridge, in 1918, soon to become public property through the broadcasts by the BBC. And English composers were inspired.
The new record from Naxos contains a splendid collection. Gustav Holst’s Christmas Day is a marvellous fantasy based on favourite carols, and Vaughan Williams is represented by Winter from Folk Songs of the Four Seasons. There are the three carols of Peter Warlock including Bulalalow. Sir Christemas and A Babe is Born by William Mathias, John Joubert’s There is no Rose and contributions by John Gardiner, John Rutter, Kenneth Leighton, Herbert Howells and the piece which gives the album its title In Terra Pax, by Gerald Finzi.
Most of the music will sound familiar and it is well sung by Julia Doyle, Roderick Williams and the City of London Choir and Bournemouth Orchestra under Hilary Davan Wetton. At budget price, this is a real winner.
Peter Spaull
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Mail on Sunday 20 December 2009
(Five Stars)
Personally I like symphonic treatments of traditional Christmas melodies. So my Christmas CD of the year by a fair margin is a top-quality bargain from Naxos entitled In Terra Pax after the longest item here: Gerald Finzi's typically eloquent reflections on boyhood Christmases.
Everything here is by British composers. Most feature traditional tunes, delightfully wrapped up by some of our most celebrated composers to create works of real substance. Gustav Holst's Christmas Day treats rhapsodically such great tunes as Good Christian Men Rejoice and The First Nowell, and it's terrific. His great friend Ralph Vaughan Williams contributes the Winter section of his Folk Songs Of The Four Seasons, composed in 1950. These four carols, collected or composed by VW himself, are exquisitely set. To bring this CD up to a generous 71 minutes, shorter items are included, such as John Rutter's ubiquitous What Sweeter Music and John Joubert's beautifully wrought There Is No Rose.
Hilary Davan Wetton, a natural successor to Richard Hickox in choral repertory, seizes a sadly rare chance to shine on disc and draws committed performances from his soloists, Julia Doyle and Roderick Williams, the City of London Choir and, in most of the items, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
David Mellor
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On-line reviews
Classics Today 23 November 2009
(Artistic Quality 9/10, Sound Quality 9/10)
www.classicstoday.com
This new holiday season has brought with it some smartly programmed Christmas choral recordings, including this one that combines The City of London Choir, soloists, organ, and the Bournemouth Symphony in both familiar works (Herbert Howells' A spotless Rose and Here is the little door; John Gardner's Tomorrow shall be my dancing day; John Rutter's What sweeter music; John Joubert's There is no rose) with those we just don't hear often enough. Among the latter are three extended pieces, Holst's Christmas Day – a festive and cleverly structured joining of several carols with its central theme, Good Christian men, rejoice; Finzi's In terra pax – a 16-minute setting of texts from poet Robert Bridges and from the gospel of St. Luke, its pleasingly meandering, engagingly tuneful, colorfully orchestrated style (with occasional big, dramatic outbursts) making for an evocative tone painting of "A frosty Christmas Eve when the stars were shining..."; and from Kenneth Leighton, not his well-loved Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child, but the longer and very challenging A hymn of the Nativity, which shows impressive virtuosity from the choir. It's also a pleasure to hear Peter Warlock's delightful little gem, Tyrley, tyrlow, as well as the more often-performed Balulalow.
Baritone Roderick Williams and soprano Julia Doyle are ideal soloists in the Finzi, but Williams stands out for his warm, lyrical tone, fluid, natural phrasing, and affecting expression. He's a very gifted interpreter whose discs of Finzi songs (type Q8992 in Search Reviews) and "Children's" songs (type Q10690) are well worth checking out. Doyle's opening to the Leighton and subsequent interaction with the choir in this difficult a cappella work is very well done, as is the substantial contribution from the orchestra. Conductor Hilary Davan Wetton has a cool and perfectly judged sense of both the celebratory and the serene, important in realizing the variety of mood and complexity in these 20th-century works. I had a little trouble with the extremely slight intonation discrepancy between choir and organ in Rutter's What sweeter music, which must have been a function of the particular acoustic space – a different venue from most of the other selections. Some listeners will notice; others won't.
The program ends in grand style with Vaughan Williams' God bless the Master (the last of his set of four "Winter" songs from his Folk songs of the four seasons. You can't help but be caught up in the joyful spirit that's apparent throughout all the performances on this disc, from the soloists and accompanists to the choir and orchestra. And while that alone is reason enough to own this, you really shouldn't miss the Leighton or the very rarely-recorded In terra pax, in this now-reference version of the work.
David Vernier
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Cross Rhythms (Rating: 9/10)
www.crossrhythms.co.uk
We all associate Christmas with special hymns to celebrate the birth of Jesus and many of us will misuse the label "carol" to describe them although, pedantically, a carol was originally a seasonal dance. However, during the Cromwellian repression when the celebration of Christmas was banned these Christmas songs went underground. Although no longer used in official church services they were still sung and gradually took on lives of their own as a sort of spiritual folk music. Think of the Mellstock Quire in Hardy's Under The Greenwood Tree to get an idea. In this pleasant collection 10 of the best British composers of the 20th century have reclaimed these folk pieces and arranged them for full choir and orchestra. The choir in question is the City Of London Choir, one of the very best amateur choirs in the country and the orchestra is the ever reliable Bournemouth Symphony. The end result is very tuneful and, perhaps, over elaborated although this is very much a matter of personal taste. The composers are, in order of appearance: Gustav Holst (1874-1934), John Joubert (born 1927), William Matthias (1934-1992), Herbert Howells (1892-1983), Gerald Finzi (1901-1956), Peter Warlock (1894-1930), Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988), John Rutter (born 1945), John Gardner (born 1917) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). I have not listed the titles as often they are vague ("Christmas Day", for example) but when you hear them you will recognise many familiar tunes that have been borrowed and re-worked and, generally speaking, given a fresh coat of paint. You may not find yourself singing along but I am sure you will find yourself smiling in happy recognition. If you are tired of the same old same old when it comes to Christmas music this may be just the CD for you and at the Naxos super budget price it is surely worth a try.
Steven Whitehead
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David's Review Corner November 2009
www.naxos.com
Sit back and enjoy a gentle and genial Christmas as seen through the eyes of ten 20th century British composers, and at the same time greet rediscovered choral jewels. It was my task for many years to organise one of the festive season’s major events, and Finzi’s In terra pax became one of my favourite pieces, while I could rely on William Mathias’s jazzy Sir Christemas to get the audience into festive mood. Sadly I missed out on Gustav Holst’s Christmas Day, a engaging medley of popular seasonal melodies that I never encountered. The Finzi together with Winter from Vaughan Williams’s Folk songs of the Four Seasons takes up almost half the disc, both happily performed by the City of London Choir and Bournemouth Orchestra. Between we have a series of ‘lollypops’, the best known coming from John Gardner with the catchy Tomorrow shall be my dancing day, and the highly fashionable John Rutter with What sweeter music. In our yesteryears Peter Warlock’s Three Carols were much enjoyed, and here features the soprano, Julia Doyle, a singer with one of the most ravishing voices to have recently emerged. Kenneth Leighton’s A hymn of the Nativity reminds us that we are celebrating the birth of someone very special to Christianity, Doyle’s voice again soaring effortlessly on high. Seventeen tracks, seventy minutes music, budget price — a treat in store.
David Denton
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Musicweb International
www.musicweb-international.com
This is a very successful disc and, with one or two caveats, it’s as good a Christmas recital as you’re likely to find this year. Hilary Davan Wetton has assembled a collection of festive music by English composers all of which, you have to keep reminding yourself, was composed in the twentieth century. There are favourites here as well as new discoveries: Holst’s Christmas Day is an entirely new work to me but it is quite delightful. It is an extremely attractive fantasia of mostly well known carols, harmonised distinctively but still pleasingly. There is simple festive merriment combined with vigorous contrapuntal weaving of The First Nowell with Come ye lofty, and it moves towards a wonderfully haunting conclusion. The Warlock collection works extremely well too, the first and third carols bright and extrovert while the central Balulalow is calm and meditative. The wonderful Finzi cantata that gives the disc its name gets a fantastic performance. The orchestra has a gorgeous glow to it, from the celesta picking out the glinting frost to the spiritual warmth of the string theme. Roderick Williams sings as beautifully and intelligently as we have come to expect, while Julia Doyle’s angel is bright and clear in both tone and texture. The Vaughan Williams items are predictably fun. They are folksong based and so you may well recognise some of the melodies from other contexts. They are beautifully harmonised (for the choir) and scored (for the orchestra) and the final carol makes a rousing, wholly satisfying conclusion to the disc.
It is in the orchestral numbers that the City of London Choir sound at their best and this is in part due to the excellent acoustic of the Lighthouse, Poole. For the numbers without the orchestra we move to St Paul’s School, Hammersmith; historically speaking this is entirely appropriate as Holst, Howells and Gardner all served as directors of music there, as did Wetton. However the surroundings must have outwitted the engineers as there is a notable shift in the perspective, distancing the choir, almost casting a veil over them. They are also noticeably breathy in much of their unaccompanied singing, especially the Joubert and Howells numbers. The organ is far too loud in What sweeter music, ruining the balance, but happily things come into better alignment for Leighton’s Hymn of the Nativity. It’s a shame that these things couldn’t have been fixed, otherwise this recital would be wholly recommendable. Maybe it’s wrong to be too picky, though: the good far outweighs the bad here and at Naxos super budget price you can afford to treat any music-lover with this, confident that they’ll be happy with it.
Simon Thompson
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