Tag Archives: Herbert Howells

On Record – The Peter Jacobs Anthology: Twentieth Century British Piano Music (Heritage Records)

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Peter Jacobs (piano)

Bax Winter Waters (1915)
Baines Preludes nos.1,3 & 6 (1919)
Benjamin Scherzino (1936)
Bliss Suite: Polonaise (1926)
Britten Sonatina Romantica: Moderato (1940)
Hold Tango (1975)
Howells Procession (1920)
Leigh Eclogue (1940)
Mayer Three Pieces from Calcutta-Nagar (1993)
Parry Scherzo in F major (pub 1922)
Quilter Summer Evening (1916)
Scott Egyptian Boat Song (1913)
Searle Vigil: France 1940-1944 (1944)
Seiber Scherzando Capriccioso (1953)
Shaw Roundabouts (1925)
Sterndale Bennett Presto agitato in F# minor Op.24/5
Stevenson A Wheen Tunes for Bairns Tae Spiel (1967)
Warren Second Sonata: Monody (1977)
Woodferne-Finden Kashmiri Song (1903)

Heritage Records HTGCD159 [76’40”]
Producer / Engineer Paul Arden-Taylor

Recorded 25 May 2021 at Wyastone Concert Hall, Wyastone Leys, Monmouth

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Besides reissuing his already extensive catalogue for other labels, Heritage has also made a number of new recordings by Peter Jacobs, with this album the first in what so far amounts to three volumes of miniatures and standalone pieces as drawn from his extensive repertoire.

Regular readers of Arcana will have come across reviews of the second and third volumes in this series, to which is now added this first instalment that ranges across the extent of Jacobs’ interest in and inclination towards unfamiliar though rewarding music by British composers.

What’s the music like?

Launched by Martin Shaw’s ebullient encore alighting on all two-dozen keys, this anthology continues with the harmonically acerbic second movement (of four) from Arthur Bliss’ early Suite, followed by music of elegant poignancy by Walter Leigh. John Mayer is heard in three from his 18 vignettes evoking sights and sounds of Calcutta (sic), with that by Roger Quilter a minor masterpiece of serenity infused with regret.

Màtyás Seiber contributes music whose liveliness and recalcitrance are entirely characteristic, with something ‘completely different’ in Amy Woodforde-Finden’s appealingly descriptive and once-ubiquitous number. Few are likely to recognize Herbert Howells as composer of a rhythmically combative piece that is (relatively) better known in its orchestral guise, while that from Arthur Benjamin could be no-one else given its playful insouciance. Dedicated ‘‘To my friends of the Fighting French Forces’’, Humphrey Searle’s evocation of war is the more powerful for its overall restraint and could well be considered the single-most impressive piece featured on this collection.

Hubert Parry is heard at his most vivacious and uninhibited; an ideal foil to Cyril Scott who, though he associated Egypt with (his own) past existences, focusses on melody of the most poetic. Much the earliest piece here, that by William Sterndale Bennett is the fifth in a six-movement suite – its deftness and agility in telling contrast to the incremental display of the opening movement from Raymond Warren’s Second Sonata. Three out of a larger sequence of preludes by William Baines constitute an object-lesson in making more out of less, while the first movement of Benjamin Britten’s never-quite-completed Sonata Romantica evinces ingenuity and didacticism in equal measure. Ronald Stevenson often aspired to the lofty or profound in his music, but the four pieces in the suite recorded here are epigrams as laconic as they are engaging. The longest single item here, Arnold Bax’s piece is at once a visceral seascape, revealing psychological study or resourceful passacaglia – the climax of an album that ends in a disarming item by Trevor Hold such as ought to win its composer new friends.

Does it all work?

As an overall sequence, undoubtedly. Jacobs is as inclusive in his interpretative acumen as   in the breadth of his musical sympathies – thereby making for a collection that plays to his strengths as convincingly as it does to those of the 19 composers who are featured herein.

Is it recommended?

Very much so, not least in the knowledge this release was merely the first in an ongoing and most valuable series bringing unfamiliar music to the attention of inquiring listeners. Sound of clarity and definition, along with Jacobs’ detailed booklet notes, are further enhancements.

Listen / Buy

You can explore purchase options at the Heritage Records website. Click on the name to read more about pianist Peter Jacobs

Published post no.2,889 – Saturday 16 May 2026

In concert – Gwilym Bowen, Gareth Brynmor John, William Vann, Navarra String Quartet @ Temple Church, London – Ian Venables: Out of the Shadows (a 70th birthday concert)

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Gwilym Bowen (tenor), Gareth Brynmor John (baritone), William Vann (piano), Navarra Quartet [Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Eva Aronian (violins), Sascha Bota (viola), Brian O’Kane (cello)]

Venables Out of the Shadows Op.55 (2023)
Vaughan Williams arr. Vann Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934)
Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge (1909)
Vaughan Williams Love Bade Me Welcome (1911)
Venables Portraits of a Mind Op.54 (2022)
Howells An Old Man’s Lullaby (1947)

The Temple Church, London
Tuesday 4 November 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

The emergence of Ian Venables as the leading British art-song composer was suitably marked with a 70th-birthday concert, sponsored by the Morris-Venables Charitable Foundation under the auspices of Temple Music Foundation and held in the evocative setting of Temple Church.

Song cycles being at the forefront of Venables’s output, it made sense to start with one of his most recent – Out of the Shadows a wide-ranging overview of male love. From the coyness of Constantine Cavafy’s At the Cafè Door and the barbed humour of Horatio Brown’s Bored, this takes in the fleeting ecstasy of Cavafy’s The Mirror in the Hall and stark soulfulness of Alfred Tennyson’s Dark House, prior to the overt playfulness of John Addington Symonds’s Love’s Olympian Laughter and calm affirmation of Edward Perry Warren’s Body and Soul.

Affectingly sung by Gareth Brynmor John (above), it preceded likely the most influential such cycle in English. A. E. Housman may have disliked his settings, but Vaughan Williams always gets to the heart of the matter in On Wenlock Edge. Hence the volatile imaginings of its title-number or hymnic poise of ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’, the brooding dialogue of ‘Is My Team Ploughing’ or nonchalant wit of ‘Oh, When I Was in Love with You’; reaching a climax in the innocence to experience of ‘Bredon Hill’, with ‘Clun’ ending the sequence in fatalistic repose.

Gwilym Bowen gave a searching account of this cycle (doubly so having replaced Alessandro Fisher at such short notice), with Brynmor John comparably attuned to the understatement of George Butterworth’s Love Blows as the Wind Blows. These settings of W. E. Henley amount to a cohesive yet subtly contrasted entity – the existential musing of In the Year that’s Come and Gone followed by the deadpan charm of Life in Her Creaking Shoes and effervescence of Fill a Glass with Golden Wine, then On the Way to Kew brings a close of deftest poise.

Bowen duly tackled a further Venables cycle. Written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s birth, Portraits of a Mind is a notably inclusive one of the composer. Hence the gentle pantheism of George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending and the meditation on creativity of Ursula VW’s Man Makes Delight His Own; the engaging impetus of R. L. Stevenson’s From a Railway Carriage a perfect foil to the resignation of Christina Rosetti’s Echo, before lines from Walt Whitman’s A Clear Midnight conjure a warm transcendence.

Throughout these performances, the playing of the Navarra Quartet (above) evinced an incisiveness and eloquence always at the service of this music; William Vann’s attentive pianism astutely deployed in his appealing arrangement of VW’s Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’. Brynmor John opened the second half with that composer’s disarming take on George Herbert’s Love Bade Me Welcome (first of Five Mystical Songs), with both vocalists heard to advantage in An Old Man’s Lullaby – Herbert Howells’s setting of Thomas Dekker that made for a winsome envoi.

Taken overall, this was a wholly pleasurable evening and welcome confirmation of Venables’ creative prowess – his corpus of songs or song-cycles surely second to none among those for whom the English language is a source of never-ending and always unexpected possibilities.

Click here to read an extensive tribute to Ian Venables on from his husband, pianist Graham J. Lloyd – or click on the names to read more about Gwilym Bowen, Gareth Brynmor John, William Vann, the Navarra Quartet and Temple Music Foundation

Published post no.2,710 – Thursday 6 November 2025

In concert – Three Choirs Festival: Three Choirs Festival Chorus, Philharmonia Orchestra / Adrian Partington – Howells Hymnus Paradisi & Bliss Mary of Magdala

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Rebecca Hardwick (soprano), Dame Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano), Michael Bell (tenor), Malachy Frame (baritone), Three Choirs Festival Chorus, Philharmonia Orchestra / Adrian Partington

Howells Paradise Rondel (1925)
Bliss Mary of Magdala (1962)
Howells Hymnus Paradisi (1936-38)

Hereford Cathedral
Wednesday 30 July 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photos (c) Dale Hodgetts (Dame Sarah Connolly, Festival Chorus), James O’Driscoll (Hereford Cathedral, Rebecca Hardwick, Adrian Partington)

Interesting that all three works comprising this concert were premiered at the Three Choirs in Gloucester or Worcester but they were, for the most part, admirably suited to the less opulent while always spacious ambience of Hereford Cathedral in what was a welcome retrospective.

Upsurge of Arthur Bliss performances in this fiftieth anniversary of his death continued with Mary of Magdala, essentially a cantata albeit with an element of operatic scena in the intense characterization of its title-role. Compiled by Christopher Hassall (the last collaboration with Bliss before his untimely death), its text finds Mary approaching the sepulchre where Christ’s body has been placed after crucifixion only to find it gone – Christ having assumed the guise of a gardener who bestows his blessing upon this most maligned yet most loyal of his circle.

The main part was given by Dame Sarah Connolly (above) with her customary fervour and insight, not least in the final stages after recognition when the music exudes a radiant gentleness rarely, if ever, encountered in Bliss hitherto. Malachy Frame drew an understated strength from the brief yet crucial role of Christus, but excessively large choral numbers rather compromised the relative intimacy of the music. Not that it seriously undermined the conviction of a timely revival for what is one of the least known though inherently personal among the composer’s later works.

It stayed under-wraps for over a decade after completion, but Hymnus Paradisi has long been the best known of Herbert Howells’s larger pieces and something like a ‘sacred text’ in Three Choirs culture. Written after the death of the composer’s son, it is avowedly music within the English choral tradition; not least that Gerontius-like aura of a Preludio (actually written last) whose yearning theme pervades what follows. The Requiem aeternam further intensifies such introspection, and if a setting of Psalm 23 tends towards the discursive, even generalized, that of Psalm 121 has a rapture that builds on an effervescent Sanctus in what is the most arresting section. A ruminative setting from The Burial Service precedes the impulsiveness of that from Salisbury Diurnal, with the return of the Requiem aeternam bringing about a fatalistic repose.

Something of a staple at these festivals it might be, Hymnus Paradisi is never an easy work to sustain in performance and tonight’s was a notable though not unqualified success. The vocal parts were well taken, Rebecca Hardwick’s occasional shrillness ostensibly a price to be paid for surmounting those often dense choral textures and Michael Bell making up for in accuracy what he lacked in personality. The sizable orchestral forces of the Philharmonia proved more than equal to the task, not just of balancing but in opening-out the expressive power of choral writing where the Three Choirs Festival Chorus was wholly in its element. Adrian Partington secured an interpretive focus that gained in conviction as the performance unfolded, making for an account which underlined the strengths yet also the weaknesses of this singular work.

It was the earlier and uninhibited Howells which ushered in proceedings. With its translucent orchestration and, at times, almost concertante-like piano part, Paradise Rondel makes for as irresistible a curtain-raiser as it no doubt was evoking that Cotswold hamlet of a century ago.

Published post no.2,615 – Sunday 3 August 2025

On record – Matthew Schellhorn plays Howells: Piano Music Vol.1 (Naxos)

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Matthew Schellhorn (piano) Herbert Howells Phantasy (1917) Harlequin Dancing (1918) My Lord Harewood’s Galliard (1949) Finzi: His Rest (1956) Summer Idyls (1911) Siciliana (1958) Pavane and Galliard (1964) Petrus Suite (1967-73) Naxos 8.571382 [65’52”] Producers Rachel Smith< Engineer Ben Connellan Recorded 19-21 August 2019 at The Menuhin Hall, Stoke D’Abernon Written by Richard Whitehouse What’s the story? Naxos continues its coverage of Herbert Howells with this initial instalment (presumably one more to follow) of his piano music, all pieces being previously unrecorded and authoritatively rendered by Matthew Schellhorn in what is a notable addition to the composer’s discography. What’s the music like? Long before his death (at the age of 90), Howells’s reputation rested firmly on his output of choral and organ works. Only quite recently has his considerable earlier output of orchestral and chamber music received serious re-evaluation, so revealing one whose distinct change of outlook in his early forties came about as much through cultural as personal reasons. Modest in scope and dimension, his piano music features no extended or career-defining works, yet its technical poise and always idiomatic feel for this instrument makes for a rewarding listen. The present selection interleaves miniatures and cyclical works in chronological order. As to the former, Phantasy finds the recently graduated composer assured in his handling of those impressionist aspects derived from Debussy and Ravel, while Harlequin Dreaming inhabits a world of Satie-esque whimsy and nonchalance as a reminder that Howells was then close friends with Bliss. Moving on to the Renaissance-inspired piano pieces of his later years, My Lord Harewood’s Galliard fuses its recherche manner with engaging harmonic astringency, whereas Finzi: His Rest is a pensively ambivalent in-memoriam to a younger colleague. The Siciliana is a languorous if non-indulgent take on the characteristic dance rhythm, while the Pavane and Galliard juxtaposes the confessional and combative with stark emotional acuity. The suites come from either end of Howells’s career, with all that implies for a half-century timespan. Summer Idyls [sic] formed a part of his portfolio for the Royal College of Music; its stylistic indebtedness to the mid- and late Romantics – not least Rachmaninov – would soon be left behind, but the appeal in these evocations of rural environs no doubt familiar from his childhood endures. Pick of the seven is the wistful rumination of ‘Near Midnight’, with the central ‘Minuet Sine Nomine’ similarly dominating the Petrus Suite in its limpid refinement. Otherwise, the seven pieces evince a sinewy counterpoint and tensile linearity    as are audibly a product of Howells’s late style, yet the origin of several in sketches made decades before confirms an overriding consistency of approach heightened by experience. Does it all work? Yes, allowing that Howells never sought to suffuse this music with the degree of emotional intensity reserved, at least in his maturity, for the larger choral works. Yet his quintessential expression is arguably to be found in those many shorter choral or organ pieces intended for liturgical purpose; in which case, the expressive focus and restraint of what is recorded here is its own justification. It could hardly have a more persuasive advocate than Schellhorn, who credits the late Stephen Cleobury for introducing him to the extent of Howells’s piano music. Is it recommended? Indeed. The closely unduly defined sound is ideal for piano music of this kind, and Jonathan Clinch’s annotations (along with a reminiscence by the pianist) are succinct and informative. The follow-up volume, mainly of better-known music, will doubtless prove just as rewarding. Listen & Buy
You can listen to clips from the recording and purchase, either in physical or digital form, at the Naxos website

On record – Roderick Williams, Michael Dussek & Bridge Quartet: Those Blue Remembered Hills (EM Records)

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Gurney
The Western Playland (and of Sorrow) (1920)
Edward, Edward (1914)
By A Bierside (1916)
String Quartet in D minor (1924-5)
Howells
There was a Maiden (1915)
Girl’s Song (1916)
King David (1919)
The Mugger’s Song (1919)

Roderick Williams (baritone), Michael Dussek (piano), Bridge Quartet [Colin Twigg, Catherine Schofield (violins), Michael Schofield (viola), Lucy Wilding (cello)]

EM Records EMR CD065 [80’52”]

Producer Rupert Marshall-Luck
Engineer Patrick Allen

Recorded 4 & 5 June 2018 at Potton Hall, Suffolk

Written by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

The latest release from EM Records is largely devoted to music by Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), including the second of his song-cycles with ensemble and the first recording of a large-scale string quartet composed before encroaching mental illness led to a cessation of his creativity.

What’s the music like?

Time was when Gurney was viewed as a poet who also wrote songs, but recent research has unearthed piano music, two orchestral pieces and numerous chamber works. Just how much he wrote and destroyed in a period of activity through to 1927 will probably never be known.

It was the success of Ludlow and Teme (recorded on EMRCD036) which led Gurney to essay a second song-cycle after A. E. Housman. Equally well received, The Western Playland was revised in 1925, when (and of Sorrow) was added to the title as if to point up that emotional dislocation the composer felt when incarcerated at City of London Mental Hospital – far from his beloved Gloucestershire. The eight songs traverse a wide expressive range, with such as a limpid setting of Loveliest of Trees and a purposeful take on Is my Team Ploughing very different in manner yet comparable in quality to those by Butterworth or Vaughan Williams. The forced jollity of the initial Reveille strikes a slightly jarring note, but the final March conjures a luminous poise which is further enhances by its extended instrumental postlude.

Also featured are two of Gurney’s songs with piano – that of the anonymous ballad Edward, Edward summons a malevolence that finds natural contrast with the sombre wartime (indeed, trench-bound) setting of John Masefield’s By a Bierside. Four songs by Herbert Howells are a reminder of the close personal and regional ties between these composers – three of which are appealing in their craftsmanship, with the setting of Walter de la Mare’s King David as affecting as any song from this period and justifiably receiving of the poet’s endorsement.

The centrepiece here is a String Quartet in D minor – one of several written during Gurney’s incarceration and which, fortunately for posterity, he was able to hear performed thanks to the redoubtable musicologist Marion M. Scott. Extensive revisions made deciphering his ultimate intentions more difficult, but the time and effort has been well worthwhile. The EMR release referred to above contains the original version of the work’s Adagio, and the revision as heard here only intensifies its anguished pathos. This, along with the ruminative ensuing intermezzo, are the highlights of an ambitious entity – the motivic ingenuity of whose opening movement feels undermined by lack of textural or rhythmic clarity; this latter failing arguably inhibiting the vehemence and drama which otherwise inform the finale as it surges to its fatalistic close.

Does it all work?

Almost. Roderick Williams is at his perceptive best in the songs, sensitively accompanied by Michael Dussek. The Bridge Quartet is superb in the song-cycle and makes a fine effort in the quartet, of which further performances are needed to assess the full extent of its achievement.

Is it recommended?

Indeed. Gurney is a composer whose stature has only latterly become apparent, and to which this disc is a signal contribution. Spacious and natural sound balance, together with detailed and often insightful annotations, further enhance what is another indispensable EMR release.

Listen and Buy

You can discover more about this release at the EM Records website, where you can hear clips from the recording and also purchase.