James Gilchrist, Finzi and the Festival Academy strings…

8 months
2 weeks ago

Cheltenham resident tenor James Gilchrist performs Finzi’s song cycle Dies Natalis with the Festival Academy Strings on Thursday 9 July.

Here, James writes personally about this fine work, which he has recorded for Naxos with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

It’s Finzi’s consummate skill with word setting that always strikes me. He knew so much English poetry and loved it beyond measure. I wonder whether somewhere this passion arises from a wish to cement his ‘Englishness’ while the unbearably stuffy, racist, smug establishment quietly and oh-so-Englishly mocked and shunned him for his funny foreign name (his parents were Italian Immigrants) and Jewishness. His sense of the pace of language and its innate music seems to burn through his setting. And it wasn’t a simple ‘gift’. He worked and worked and worked again at the vocal line — often over many years, coming back to works he had set aside — until he felt he had it right.

In Dies Natalis he’s chosen some of the loveliest of words to set. The conceit is instantly striking: we give voice and understanding to the dumb and overwhelmed sense of a new-born child as he looks in awe-struck amazement at the beautiful world around him. The innocence of the love and wonder is (apparently) effortlessly carried through in musical thought. We live, enraptured with the child as he muses upon the miracle of life and birth, the apparent personal meaningfulness of life around him: the trees, the people are there in order to bring delight and meaning to this child’s world. And something of the divine has come to earth (‘how like an Angel came I down’) and rests in this moment of awe with us. And as he wonders at the extraordinary unlikeliness — the miracle — of his own creation, he is humbled with the thought that, though creation is an incomprehensible and strange unlikely event, yet ‘that they mine should be, who nothing was: that strangest is of all’.

I have known this work for many years, and have been lucky enough to be able to perform it often. I think this performance with the Festival Academy should prove special. We will have time and space to get to know it over several days (a luxury alas all too rarely found in the professional music world) and having young people play, who might perhaps come to the work afresh, might allow our performance to capture some of the ‘sublime and celestial Greatness’ which suffuses this astonishing work.

Festival Academy performances

• Festival Academy 1 — Thursday 9 July 2009, 11am
• Festival Academy 2 — Friday 10 July 2009, 3pm
• Festival Academy 3 — Friday 10 July 2009, 9.30pm
• Festival Academy 4 — Saturday 11 July 2009, 11am

We’ve tagged this post with Festival Academy, James Gilchrist, music on Wednesday 1 July 2009.