A Song of Farewell

A Song of Farewell

A Song of Farewell is an a cappella programme of deeply reflective music for mourning and consolation. It includes British choral masterpieces ancient and modern. At the heart of the programme is Howells’ sublime Requiem.

Running order

Drop, drop slow tears Orlando Gibbons (1583 - 1625)

Drop, drop, slow tears (a litany) William Walton (1902 – 83)

Christe qui lux es et dies I Robert White (d.1574)

A child's prayer James MacMillan (b.1959)

In manus tuas John Sheppard (d.1559)

Into thy hands Jonathan Dove (b.1959)

Funeral Sentences Thomas Morley (1557/8 – 1602)

They are at rest Edward Elgar (1857 - 1934)

Requiem Herbert Howells (1892 – 1983)

Salvator mundi

The Lord is my shepherd

Requiem aeternam

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills

Requiem aeternam

I heard a voice from heaven

Lord, let me know mine end C. Hubert H. Parry (1848 – 1918)

from Songs of Farewell

“...Paul McCreesh has devised such a satisfying programme of mostly short a cappella pieces that the effect is the reverse of depressing. ... An excellent disc...”

The Gramophone, May 2012

“...there are numerous indications of the elevated artistry Paul McCreesh ad the 22 singers of his Gabrieli Consort bring to this beautifully planned and executed programme. ... This is a superlative, unmissable issue.”

BBC Music Magazine, May 2012

The universal human experience of loss, sorrow and mourning has found powerful expression in artistic creations of many kinds: verbal, visual and musical. Perhaps the language of music is especially well suited to convey the profundity of these feelings, whether or not it is combined with verbal text: the possibility of communicating sorrow that is ineffable, and sometimes of offering some element of consolation.

The question, seemingly trivial but at the same time of real interest, of which pieces of music any of us would elect as the most potent expressions of loss throws up many possible candidates. Somewhere in this list would surely be the Requiem of Herbert Howells, not only as a piece of music whose telling and idiosyncratic harmonic language creates some spine-chilling moments, but also because it was long thought to have been written in response to the sudden death of the composer’s son at the age of nine, a devastating event that always remained at the forefront of Howells’ life, ‘a ground bass to his existence’, in the words of his biographer Paul Spicer. In this programme, Howells’ Requiem is placed alongside works by British composers from the 16th to the late 20th centuries that explore difference responses to the loss that is brought about by death, encompassing mourning, serene expressions of religious faith in another life, and formal funeral ritual.