The program title is borrowed from one of Gerald Finzi's most radiant partsongs — a setting of Robert Bridges whose unforced joy feels entirely at home in the longer days and opening skies of spring. English choral music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a body of unaccompanied partsong writing of extraordinary refinement: intimate in scale, exquisite in voice-leading, and deeply rooted in the English lyric tradition.
At the heart of this program stand Hubert Parry's Songs of Farewell — six settings of grave and luminous poetry that together form one of the great valedictions in the choral repertoire — gathered alongside partsongs of Edward Elgar, Finzi, and their contemporaries: music that moves between elegy and celebration, the pastoral and the profound.
We invite you to join us this May, and to let the music speak, as it so beautifully can, directly to the heart.
Christian Lane, direction