Here is another excellent record by the Finzi Singers in a series which is proving as valuable as anything in the current lists. They have standards in their choice of music as in their manner of performance, and everything they have undertaken in their recordings has been in a tradition of good workmanship and good taste. Curious: we used to be nationally somewhat defensive about music of this sort, as though it were parochial in reach and relevance, reserved in emotion, limited in means. Two things that recordings such as these make absolutely clear are that the means are as apt to their purpose as an orchestra or string quartet to the masters of symphonic and chamber music, and (a point increasingly enforced) that the emotions are as deep and as movingly voiced as in the operas or song-cycles where their validity has been so much more commonly accepted.
This present programme, with its alternation of works by Howells and Vaughan Williams, illustrates the individuality of both composers as well as the shared possession of a culture deeply loved and richly imbued. Howells's is the more rhapsodic in style, the more misty in its mysticism. The ecstatic prolonging of Joseph Beaumont's plain four-line verses in The House of the Mind is characteristic. The lines of his Requiem are relatively clear, and the concept of Psalm-settings holding the ''Requiem aeternam'' (''the nub of the matter'' as Paul Spicer says in his notes) cupped between the hands is strong. Yet Vaughan Williams in his own mysticism is a great deal clearer still. In Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge the counterpointing of the St Anne tune stands out first with a soft glow and then, with the trumpet solo, in letters of fire. The Prayer to the Father of Heaven, in which he hoped his master Parry might have found ''something characteristic'', is indeed unmistakable RVW in the disquieting major/minor tonalities and the triplet figures. In his setting of Ezekiel and the wheel, as A Vision of Aeroplanes, there is a great release of energy in a pictorialism quite distinct from Howells's inward raptures. All are finely caught in these performances, not least the aeroplanes in Harry Bickett's imaginative registration and skilful playing. Choral tone, the work of soloists drawn from the choir, recorded sound, written presentation, all are admirable features of a highly recommendable disc.'