Herbert Howells - Requiem & other choral works (Stephen Layton)

Information

Composer: Herbert Howells

• (01) A Hymn for St. Cecilia
• (02) Salve regina
• (03) Gloucester Service
• (05) Take him, earth, for cherishing
• (06) St. Paul's Service
• (08) Requiem
• (14) Michael: All my hope on God is founded

Simon Bland, organ
Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge
Stephen Layton, conductor

Date: 2012
Label: Hyperion
https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA67914

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review

Will only male choirs do for Howells’s sacred music? So previous commentators have insisted, though only the most rigid epigone would say the same for the cantatas of Bach. By the same token, well-enunciated American English isn’t out of place, especially when the Massachusetts-based Gloriae Dei Cantores sing a work written for Washington National Cathedral – a late and unfinished Te Deum, at that, and like the Dallas canticles more tonally stable than their earlier counterparts written for English cathedrals. Much as I welcome John Buttrey’s completion of this gently persuasive setting, my reservation is more basic and concerns breadth of tone. Parallel semitones (the opening of the Chichester Magnificat), simple psalms (No 23 from the Requiem) and bold unisons (in the Te Deum) don’t make the intended effect and stray perilously away from the note (too often under it, in the case of the sopranos) when the vibrato is wide and the recorded balance diffuse. Unless you’re in the middle of this music, singing it, you can often strain to catch the details, whether heard on record or in church, and the wide dynamic range required can be more help than hindrance.

Hyperion’s disc, then, is all the more impressive for dispelling the clouds of dissonance that have given Howells the bad name of a meandering mystic and letting us hear what a fine ear he had, not just for the juicy suspension or overpowering cadence but for deft two-part harmony, as one finds throughout the understated Gloucester Canticles. The choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, is ideally pure and full in tone. The grand hymns and canticles are extrovert and focused, the intimate supplications such as Take him, earth sung with great poise. Comparisons can flatter to deceive but, by the side of the Trinity choir’s Requiem, the Choir of St John’s sounds too quick, the Vasari Singers too distant, the Cambridge Singers a little plain; even my previous favourite, the Corydon Singers, don’t alight on chords with quite the full and alert appreciation of what makes Howells Howells, that impassioned, modally inflected application to the personal and the numinous which reminds me more of Bruckner than Stanford. How good it is to hear the St Paul’s Service not swallowed up by the dome of that cathedral but still buttressed by a mighty Willis beast, belonging in this case to Lincoln. In a recital of many highlights, I have returned again and again to the St Paul’s Nunc dimittis: spaciously paced and surely directed towards a ritardando of almighty breadth more associated with the ambivalent Catholic Mahler than the equally ambivalent Protestant Howells. This is a perfect disc of its kind.

-- Peter Quantrill, Gramophone

More reviews:
MusicWeb International  RECORDING OF THE MONTH
https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/mz8r/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/mar/29/howells-requiem-layton-cd-review
https://www.allmusic.com/album/herbert-howells-requiem-mw0002324475
https://www.amazon.com/Howells-Requiem-St-Cecilia-St-Pauls-Service/dp/B0072A4FC0

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Herbert Howells (17 October 1892 – 23 February 1983) was an English composer, organist, and teacher. Howells studied at the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood. In 1920 he joined the staff of the RCM, and remained there until 1979. From the late 1930s, after the death of his son because of polio, Howells turned increasingly to choral and organ music. Though not an orthodox Christian, Howells was chiefly identified with the composition of religious music. His most famous works includes Hymnus Paradisi, Stabat Mater and Requiem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Howells

***

Stephen Layton (born 23 December 1966) is an English conductor. He studied at Eton College, and then King's College, Cambridge as an organ scholar under Stephen Cleobury. Whilst studying at Cambridge, Layton founded the mixed-voice choir Polyphony in 1986. Layton has been Second Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the City of London Sinfonia since 2010. Layton’s discography on Hyperion ranges from Handel and Bach with original instruments to Arvo Pärt. He has received awards such as two Gramophone Awards, Diapason d’Or and four Grammy nominations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Layton
http://www.stephenlayton.com/

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FLAC, tracks

Links in comment

Enjoy!