Readers who have collected the first two volumes in this series (4/97 and 8/98) will surely want to add the third. The performances have all those qualities of careful preparation and musicianly accomplishment which marked the previous issues, and the programme includes some of the most imaginative of Britten’s writing for unaccompanied choir. In date of composition they range from 1933, when the 19-year-old gave such astounding evidence, in A Boy was Born, of his mastery of variation-form and knowledge of choral resources, to 1975 when he wrote the eight settings, Sacred and Profane, ‘For PP and the Wilbye Consort’. There is a sturdy continuity of line here: the same literary taste chose the texts, the same imagination leapt into boldly committed action, whether turning his notes to ice for ‘In the bleak midwinter’ or rollicking grimly in ‘A Death’. In between came the Five Flower Songs of 1950, with something preparatory to the Choral Dances in Gloriana about them. And even Advance Democracy, with its clenched fist and unabashed C major fortissimo, has qualities that make it more than a prize period-piece from the late 1930s.
Again we are involved in comparisons with The Sixteen, and again results are more a matter of fine tuning than of a decisive verdict. In the Flower Songs The Sixteen make a quicker, more eager, start, and particularly in ‘Marsh flowers’ they bring more energy to the dotted rhythms; there’s sharper point to their singing, and they are helped in this by the rather drier acoustic. In Advance Democracy they take a sexier view of the rhythm, a suggestion of the dance-floor enlivening the workers’ tread. But then in Sacred and Profane, the Finzi Singers are lighter and rather more blithe of spirit in ‘Lenten is come with love to toune’, and in A Boy was Born the honours are fairly even. As before with the Finzi Singers, an occasional edginess of tone becomes evident when sopranos or tenors are under pressure, but equally they avoid the impersonal, homogenized sound that sometimes characterizes these expert groups. The booklet is attractively produced, with useful notes by Judith LeGrove and a modern English translation of the medieval poems.'