Harold Darke:
- As the leaves fall
- The Kingdom of God
Maurice Duruflé:
- Requiem, Op. 9

On first mention, British organist and composer Harold Darke (1888-1976) may not sound familiar, but I'm sure practically everyone as heard on many occasions, his beautiful setting of In the bleak midwinter (not to be confused with the Gustav Holst version), which you can hear in the second audio clip of this Christmas CD review. There's a serene, reflective and reverential quality to his writing which conceals an underlying layer of phlegmatic and stolid power. For example, his Cantata As the leaves fall, heard here in its world premiere recording, is unified by a simple and yet powerfully evocative, recursive 5-note motif first heard when the choir comes in, that is equally uplifting and mournful in its expressive effect. Every time it returns, it pulls you back in deeper within the stoic, poetic text paying tribute to the fallen of the First World War. The balance between the solo part, sung beautifully here by soprano Hannah Dienes-Williams, the choir and orchestral forces, is exemplary from start to finish. Hard to believe that a piece of music this well conceived has not been recorded before.

To a certain extent, the same could be said of the inspired Requiem by Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986), a timid and reclusive musician and composer who eschewed the trends of the day while he diligently worked out his own, rather unique style of musical expression. This Requiem, completed in 1947, is generally serene and reflective until within the Sanctus its focal point, where it bursts out in magnificent multi-layered levels of exuberant power. Unlike the dark, foreboding, ground-shaking Requiem Masses of say Verdi and Berlioz, it's more in line with the creation by Gabriel Fauré, gradually leading towards the promised light of the afterlife.

If you enjoy choral music in general, and would like to hear something hitherto inexplicably unrecorded, and a Requiem setting too often overlooked, I strongly recommend you add this CD to your collection. The booklet doesn't mention exactly where the recording took place, but I would assume it was inside the Guildford Cathedral itself. The audio engineering well captures the four-dimensional depth, and airy acoustic of such a structure.