Home listening - A Walk With Ivor Gurney, Music for Brass Septet Vol 6 and more…

The Guardian 0

English pastoral music draws fine performances from Tenebrae and friends, Septura – and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales

• In Tenebrae’s A Walk With Ivor Gurney (Signum Classics, two CDs), director Nigel Short, Aurora Orchestra, mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and narrator Simon Callow weave a moving and affectionate programme around the artistic landscape of the Cotswolds-born poet-composer. The starting point is Gloucester Cathedral and the Three Choirs festival, where Gurney and his friend, fellow composer Herbert Howells, first heard and found inspiration in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Gurney’s In Flanders (“I’m homesick for my hills again… Cotswold or Malvern, sun or rain”), wistfully sung by Connolly, and Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy (settings of Matthew Arnold) powerfully evoke time and place. The disc’s title is from an extended piece for soloist and choir by Judith Bingham, commissioned by Tenebrae in 2013 and superbly sung by this top vocal ensemble. This is an album full of riches.