Classical home listening - Herbert Howells, Sean Shibe's Bach and Royal Opera's Il trittico

The Guardian 0

The Bach Choir and top soloists join forces in Howells’s Mass of the Severn; and guitarist Sean Shibe makes Bach his own

• Herbert Howells’s Missa Sabrinensis, written for the Worcester Three Choirs festival in 1954 and dedicated to the Severn – a river associated both with the composer, who was born in Gloucestershire, and with the festival’s geographic heartland – nearly didn’t make it. Howells’s bag containing the score was stolen and thrown from a train; luckily it was recovered by the police. The piece has never been as well known as his Hymnus Paradisi, but speaks to the English aesthetic of that time, the orchestral opening almost a homage to Vaughan Williams.