Music and Vinyl: Finzi - Intimations of Immortality

One of Gerald Finzi's most ambitious works was his setting of nine of the eleven verses of William Wordsworth's ode "Intimations of Immortality" - scored for tenor soloist, choir and orchestra. Although he had started composition in the late 1930s, it wasn't completed until 1950, where it was first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral. Set as one continuous movement, critics have compared it to William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, not always in a kindly way. Finzi was most at home with smaller forces, his dramas laid out in a more intimate scale as the Gramophone Review of this recording (reproduced below) describes.

Gerald Finzi

Nevertheless, this is a poignant and heartfelt work, with Finzi's clarity of vocal writing to the fore, and with a thematic integrity binding it all together. There are some mighty climaxes - maybe not as harmonically pointed as Walton would have done - and some simple, almost child-like melodies that are quite disarming.

This recording was made by the Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir (of which yours truly happened to a member of at the time) in a cold Guildford Cathedral in November 1973 shortly after a concert performance. The programme for this concert is given below - and what a concert it was, with Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Britten's Violin Concerto comprising the first half - a typical Tod Handley programme for the receptive Guildford audience! Handley had turned the Guildford Orchestra into a fully-professional outfit when he became Music Director, and a great many musicians from the London orchestras travelled to Guildford for the opportunity to expand their repertoire with the enterprising programmes on offer.