Track Listing

1. Five Mystical Songs: Easter - John Shirley-Quirk
2. Five Mystical Songs: I Got Me Flowers - John Shirley-Quirk
3. Five Mystical Songs: Love Bade Me Welcome - John Shirley-Quirk
4. Five Mystical Songs: The Call - John Shirley-Quirk
5. Five Mystical Songs: Antiphon - John Shirley-Quirk
6. O Clap Your Hands - Chor Of King's College, Cambridge
7. A Choral Fant, H177 - Dame Janet Baker
8. Psalm 86, No.1 H117 - Ian Partridge/Purcell Singers
9. Dies Natalis, Op.8: Intrada - Wilfred Brown
10. Dies Natalis, Op.8: Rhap (Recitativo Stromentato) - Wilfred Brown
11. Dies Natalis, Op.8: The Rapture (Danza) - Wilfred Brown
12. Dies Natalis, Op.8: Wonder (Arioso) - Wilfred Brown
13. Dies Natalis, Op.8: The Salutation (Aria) - Wilfred Brown

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17024 in Music
• Released on: 1996-04-01
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 71 minutes

Customer Reviews

The only recording of Dies Natalis
The Wilfred Brown/Christopher Finzi performance of Finzi's Dies Natalis is for me the only performance. I first bought it on LP about thirty-five years ago and played it to death. During the intervening years I have bought other recordings, and many of these are fine, but no one touches Wilfred Brown for the innocence and freshness which, I believe, is essential for ths work.

John Shirley Quirk's Mystical Songs is also magnificent, capturing a fervour that is often lacking elsewhere.

If you love this repertoire, you cannot be without these revelatory performances. Age seems not to touch them. You are left only with vision and wonder.

Direct masterpieces
Holst's Choral Fantasia is one of his late, austere works scored for soprano soloist (performed here by the mezzo Janet Baker in stirringly oracular form), chorus, organ, timpani, brass and strings. It is, in effect, a requiem for artists, and became a requiem for the poet whose words Holst set, Robert Bridges. The music is uncompromising and direct at first, with only organ and brass in evidence for the first six minutes or so of the work; warmth finally appears with the chorus singing 'Rejoice ye dead...that yet on earth your fame is bright, and that your names remembered day and night live on the lips of those who love you well'. Strings add further to this warmth, reaching a climax with the words 'Now ye are starry names', leading to a chilling denoument with the return of the opening music. It is as if we are here confronted with the bleakness of death, and the rest of the work seems to be addressing how to find reconciliation with that implacable fate; it ends poignantly with a final soprano solo drifting into silence as if in farewell.

This, and the simple yet moving setting of Psalm 86, were the original coupling to the classic Finzi recording already eloquently written about by 'Olfreda'. These alone would make this disc an essential purchase for fans of these composers, but EMI has added some sweet icing in the form of Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs, beautifully performed by John Shirley-Quirk with the Choir of King's College Cambridge. A real treasure of a disc.