Although Parry is often thought of as a composer of Anglican church music, he did in fact write very little music strictly for the liturgy. Though trained in the organ loft under George Elvey at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the 1860s, and a composer of anthems and service music during his years at Eton, Oxford and his first years in London as an underwriter at Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, his deep-seated agnosticism led him away from a career in the church (in contradistinction to his colleagues Stainer and Stanford). Yet, perhaps because of Parry’s aptitude as a composer of choral music, the theistic content of much of his output and the fact that certain pieces have become a regular feature of choral services, the association of Parry with the Anglican liturgy has become entrenched. This album, produced as a 40-year anniversary tribute to David Rowland, director of music at Christ’s College, Cambridge, features the Parry choral ‘classics’ and is sung by the college choir augmented by former choir members over the past 20 years; moreover, in order to accommodate the larger choir, the recording was made (in March 2023) at St Michael’s Cornhill in the City of London, a church Parry knew well and where he heard the former organist and director of music Harold Darke try over some of his later organ works.

The larger size of the choir on this recording is especially appropriate to the muscular grand architecture so characteristic of Parry’s formal conceptions and the forces for which the composer wrote much of this repertoire. I was glad, essentially a pièce d’occasion, is presented here replete with both ‘vivats’ for our current monarchs and has a sturdy impact in keeping with the opulent choral sound of George V’s coronation of 1911 that compares well with the splendid sound of the CUMS chorus under Philip Ledger’s direction on EMI, recorded for Queen Elizabeth’s 1977 Jubilee. Written for even larger forces at the Salisbury Diocesan Festival in 1894, the verse anthem Hear my words, ye people is sung with dramatic conviction and careful intonation, and the two soloists, Martin Oxenham and Ruth Provost, provide nicely shaped verses that punctuate the strong pillars of Parry’s choral statements, not least the finale, ‘O praise ye the Lord’, set to the well-known tune Laudate Dominum, which later found its way into Hymns Ancient & Modern and has now become a hymn ‘classic’. Another piece written for regal commemoration, Blest pair of Sirens (Queen’s Victoria’s Golden Jubilee), represents the prowess of Parry’s double-choir technique par excellence and its rich choral sonorities suit the sound of the more numerous voices that would have been the Bach Choir under Stanford in 1887. The sopranos in particular sing the opening of Milton’s epode (‘O may we soon renew that song’) with real yearning and set up the fugue – which, at least for me, seems a little slow but maintains a compelling momentum as it builds to Parry’s uplifting climax with the return of the opening ritornello. The organ accompaniments, ably furnished by Julian Collings, are also a worthy substitute for Parry’s orchestra, not to mention the transcription of Elgar’s elaborate orchestration from 1922.

I also much enjoyed the a cappella part of this recording, the bulk of which is taken up by the six Songs of Farewell, though this exceptional cycle of motets is headed up by Parry’s lovely part-song interpretation of Shelley’s ‘Music, when soft voices die’ from his Six Modern Lyrics. The latter was part of a commission in 1897 for the Magpie Minstrel Society and would have been sung by a choir of up to 200 voices, so the performance here is rather closer to the sound Parry would have heard rather than the more fragile one of today’s small chamber choirs. Similarly, the Songs of Farewell, which are most frequently sung by chamber choirs or cathedral choirs, were first sung by the mixed forces of the Royal College of Music chorus or the Oxford Bach Choir (who performed them, augmented by singers from the RCM, complete for the first time after Parry’s death in 1919), though at the time securing enough tenors and basses was a problem because of students who had gone off to war. Hearing the motets, notably those more technically challenging in six, seven and eight parts, with the more substantial size of the choir, affords an instructive perspective of these remarkable, deeply emotional pieces as they might have been experienced in the era in which Parry lived.