Gerald Finzi

I have been catching up on parts of my MP3 collection that I bought a while ago and haven’t really listened to much. Amng them are some collections of music by Gerald Finzi. His large scale works – Clarinet Concerto and Cello Concerto – I know fairly well and I really like them – melancholy, introspective, obviously first half of the 20th century English, but an individual voice that sounds different to the more robust Vaughan Williams. I have particularly enjoyed listening now though to this below, which is an excellent collection of

smaller pieces – Finzi seems to have had a habit of starting works and not finishing them off, so that the piece entitled ‘Eclogue’ on this collection is actually the slow movement of a not-completed piano concerto, and ‘Introit’, another piece which is the surviving movement of a violin concerto dropped from any list of opuses.

I’ve also been listening to ‘Dies Natalis’ – which I enjoyed – and ‘Intimations of Mortality’, which I haven’t really got into yet. All his music is worth exploring – an individual and interesting voice…….. (which sounds patronising but is my gut reaction)