Finnissy: Pious Anthems & Voluntaries / Nethsingha, Choir of St. Johns College Cambridge
Michael Finnissy was born in Tulse Hill in 1946. He studied at the Royal College of Music with Bernard Stevens and Humphrey Seale, and in Italy with Roman Vlad. Much of his early work was first performed in France and the Netherlands, while he was working as a freelance repetiteur and pianist for dance-classes. He taught at the Royal Academy of Music, at the universities of Sussex and Southampton, and at the Katholiek Universiteit in Leuven. He has also given summer courses at Dartington, and been resident artist at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne (Australia). He has been featured composer at the Huddersfield Festival several times, at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and many other places across the world, most recently at SICPP in Boston USA.
In this new recording the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge perform Finnissy’s deep, rich and fulfilling music – created as part of a residency, which combines evocative works directly inspired by Tudor Music from the choir's library with more free-form inspirations of this material by the composer. It has taken Conductor and Director Andrew Nethsingha four years to gradually learn the pieces on this recording. He says it “has been a deeply enriching experience which I want others to share”.
REVIEW:
This is a virtuoso piece of work in several respects. Composer Michael Finnissy was commissioned to write four a cappella works for the Choir of St. John's College and not only fulfilled but expanded upon that commission, writing pieces that comment upon works already in the choir's repertory. The four works -- John Taverner's Dum transisset sabatum, Thomas Tallis' Videte miraculum, Bach's cantata Herr Christ, der einige Gottessohn, and Michael Tippett's Plebs angelica -- are not presented in their original forms, but some of them receive double treatments from Finnissy in the form of "doubles," "commentaries," or an "alternativo" on the organ. The whole falls into a structure pertaining to the life of Christ, resulting in an intricate but wholly accessible triple set of commentaries. The whole idea would have felt very familiar to Taverner and Tallis, and probably to Bach as well. Finnissy departs from his models to varying degrees, maintaining the general mood of the original while adding difficult features like half-step intervals for the choristers, which they dispatch with aplomb. The album is beautifully recorded, and it will reveal a whole new dimension of this composer to those familiar only with this virtuoso piano music and political vocal works.
-- AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)
Product Description:
-
Release Date: August 14, 2020
-
UPC: 635212062425
-
Catalog Number: SIGCD624
-
Label: Signum Classics
-
Number of Discs: 2
-
Period: Contemporary
-
Composer: Michael Finnissy
-
Conductor: Andrew Nethsingha
-
Orchestra/Ensemble: Choir of St. John's Cambridge
-
Performer: Cambridge, Nethsingha