Nick Pritchard and Ian Tindale on Gerald Finzi

Released this coming Friday on Signum Classics to mark the seventieth anniversary of Gerald Finzi's death, Nick Pritchard and Ian Tindale's new album The Dance Continued features the three song cycles Till Earth Outwears, Oh Fair to See (both posthumously assembled and published by the composer's executors) and A Young Man’s Exhortation, plus five unpublished songs recently unearthed from the Bodleian Library - 'Days Too Short', 'A Cradle Song', 'The Terrible Robber Men', 'Rondel', and 'English Hills'.

In a break from preparations for their upcoming concerts at St Clement Danes Church on The Strand and Temple Church in London, Nick and Ian spoke to me about their longstanding love for Finzi's music, why it hasn't travelled in the same way as the work of other British composers of the same generation, his deep affinity with the poetry of Thomas Hardy, and the joy of discovering those five early songs...

How long has Finzi been in your lives?

Ian: This has been such a passion project because we both adore Finzi’s music and really want to bring it to more people’s attention. It has a lot of surface-level appeal, but you can find so many layers in everything he wrote – songs, orchestral works, the lot. We’ve been programming these pieces together for a long time, and if you love something you put it out there!

Nick: When Ian and I met as students at the Royal College of Music, Oh Fair To See was one of the first things we looked at together. I’ve known and loved this music since I was at school: when I was sixteen our Head of Music gave me a copy of James Gilchrist’s recording which was recorded in my old school, Christ’s Hospital, in 2006. He saw this young tenor just setting out and said: ‘Here’s someone you could model yourself on, and here’s some repertoire which would really serve you well’. 

That was a pivotal moment in terms of finding a real affinity with repertoire and figuring out how to sing it. We performed Dies Natalis at my school leavers’ concert: trying to get your chops round that at the tender age of eighteen sounds ridiculous, but I had a good go!

It’s quite surprising that these cycles aren’t better represented on record, given how often we hear them in recital in the UK…

Nick: Absolutely - I love that recording with James and Anna Tilbrook (and also John Mark Ainsley with Iain Burnside from 2007), but I always assumed there were more out there…When Ian and I came to do this project I found that these are the most recent studio recordings! Given the tradition of song in this country and the fact that they’re core repertoire for English tenors, it seems odd – Finzi’s one of the most significant song composers we have. I wonder if one reason is that Finzi doesn’t have a vast profile outside of the UK. Come to think of it, I’ve never performed his music abroad…

Ian: I’ve done three or four songs in Germany and they were received very…politely! The texts can be quite difficult for non-native speakers, and the soundworld is so quintessentially English. But Simon Rattle did a lot for Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams during his time with the Berlin Phil, and I don’t really understand why Finzi hasn’t travelled in the same way. 

Nick: Vaughan Williams studied in France, and maybe the scale of Elgar’s music plays a part… The ‘nationality’ of music is something that always fascinates me: how can we hear that something is French or English etc, and would someone who isn’t immersed in classical music still be able to tell that? I think it is possible for people who aren't quite so attuned to pick up on these things, but the Englishness of Finzi’s music feels much more acute than is the case with someone like Britten. Our album comes out two days before the seventieth anniversary of his death, which is also when all his music comes out of copyright…hopefully that might move the needle!

Ian: I think the fact that he didn’t write big concert-hall works plays a part: there’s almost a concerto or two, and unusual things like Dies Natalis which goes beyond a conventional song cycle, but no symphonies or oratorios. And Finzi was writing so much in that interwar period and throughout the Second World War before his life was cut short, so maybe that slightly curtailed the movement of the music. And he himself didn’t travel much, partly because of ill health and partly because he enjoyed his English country life!

He studied with Herbert Sumsion and Ernest Farrar, and people like Stanford and Vaughan Williams must have been on the periphery, but he never took a Paris trip to see Nadia Boulanger or went to Leipzig like Ethel Smyth…none of those things really happened for him. 

Nick: And he was writing at a very specific, singular time – a lot of his music is war-themed, and maybe that didn't travel quite so well post-War! Finzi died in 1956, but it’s interesting to speculate about how things might have evolved for him through the mid-50s to the 70s: people were moving around a lot more in the aftermath of the War but given that he stuck to a fairly small patch of England that may not have appealed to him anyway. He conducted a bit but only with his local group, the Newbury String Players (which he founded in 1940).

What was it about Hardy’s verse that spoke to Finzi so strongly?

Nick: A lot of Finzi's letters are steeped in the same regret and longing for the past which also preoccupies Hardy. He comes across as a very wistful man, and also a very political one: he was extremely concerned with the tectonic changes wrought by the Wars, and again that connects with Hardy’s fixation on the backward glance. He talks about Hardy so fondly in his letters, so he obviously felt a strong affinity.

Ian: He went to great trouble to collect Hardy memorabilia, including a walking stick and a collection of first editions!

Nick: And of course both the poetry and the novels are strongly rooted in place - Hardy’s Wessex isn’t a million miles away from where Finzi spent a lot of his life. Hardy’s a famously difficult poet to set, but Finzi did a hell of a lot of it so he must've found a way in!

Ian: I’m by no means a Hardy scholar, but what speaks to me is the way he creates neologisms and compound words in his poetry (less so in his novels) – and the associated soundworlds and imagery set Finzi up to write some very beautiful music. As I mentioned earlier, some of the poems are quite complicated, almost like streams of consciousness. But there’s also a simplicity in a lot of his work: in particular a naivety and a nostalgia for naivety or lost innocence which translates into song very well.

That idea of lost innocence also calls Britten to mind…did they know one another?

Ian: Finzi was part of that generation who were constantly in Britten’s shadow. It seems that there was no love lost between them, and Finzi certainly wasn’t part of Britten’s inner circle. He was, however, quite connected with people like Holst, Gurney and Howells - there’s correspondence with all of them in the collected letters. 

Nick: I’ve just grabbed my copy of Diana McVeagh’s edition of the letters, and there are quite a few references to Britten…mostly Finzi talking about him in quite an acidic way!

How naturally does his writing sit in the voice/under the hands?

Nick: Ian and I have always been struck by how idiomatically he writes for both parties, given that he wasn’t a pianist or a singer. He did a bit of work with Wilfred Brown, the tenor who became closely associated with Dies Natalis, and he had a few people who’d come over to his house and sing through things but there wasn’t a Pears-style muse in his life.

I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that he was a vociferous reader who was acutely attuned to the ebb and flow of these very lyrical texts - it sounds a bit pretentious but if a composer understands the music that’s already in the poetry, then the vocal writing will evolve naturally. I often find that things which don’t sit comfortably in the voice just aren’t great settings of texts in the first place!

Ian: Finzi often had an instant musical response to texts. Take ‘It Never Looks Like Summer’, which he read once and came up with a melodic idea straight away but never developed it for some reason. Decades later he came back to the poem afresh and thought ‘I really should set this…’ and produced an almost identical line!

Tell me about the discovery of the five songs which receive their world premiere recordings on the album…

Nick: We were looking for something to go alongside the three song cycles on the album, partly to give it a unique selling point but also to flesh it out – a sixty-minute CD is acceptable, but we wanted to give a bit extra! We were originally thinking of commissioning something, but that fell by the wayside because of budget and timing - by the time the project was greenlit we were quite short on time because we needed to get it out for the anniversary year! We started looking for existing, unrecorded pieces with a link to Finzi, but that proved a bit of a dead end!

So we went back to the Diana McVeagh book, which has an appendix listing the various unpublished and incomplete pieces; Ian noticed that it included a handful of songs in the Bodleian Library, which received all of Finzi’s manuscripts after his death. We applied for access to all of the unpublished songs and eliminated the ones which wouldn’t work fairly quickly: some of them are incomplete, some were for male voice ensemble or with organ, one for organ, and some of the manuscripts had so many changes and annotations that it would have been difficult to decide what was fair to put down on a recording.

Ian: Martin Holmes, the Oxford music librarian, is a huge fount of knowledge, and after he received our initial enquiry he flagged up all the ones that didn’t have legs - he’d already semi-curated it for us, and we’re very much indebted to him. These people are walking encyclopaedias!

Nick: The people at the Finzi Trust were also great, because you have to apply for permission to access and then record this stuff. They were well on board from the outset - we didn’t have to persuade them at all!

I must admit that I wouldn’t have identified most of them as Finzi if I’d been listening blind! Did you feel the same?

Ian: It’s fascinating, because they’re not echt Finzi but there are flavours there…all of those pastoral themes like hope in springtime and yearning for England are already present. You certainly feel that in 'English Hills', which is a partner song to 'Only The Wanderer': there are some thematic links, and they were probably written at the same time. In things like the Chaucer setting ‘Rondel’ and the little 'Cradle Song', you can feel Finzi finding his way – he was probably only nineteen or twenty when he wrote these. 

Finzi had this idea that a song cycle needed to be quite substantial in terms of length: the only cycle for tenor which was published in his lifetime is A Young Man’s Exhortation (which consists of ten songs), and he never managed to complete others which met his criteria! That’s why we have things like O Fair To See and Till Earth Outwears, which were put together posthumously by Howard Ferguson and Joy Finzi from existing manuscripts. That gave us licence to include these five on an album alongside other early songs, almost like a mini-cycle.

Nick: It was magic holding these handwritten manuscripts, and how often do you come across a premiere recording with a composer of this profile who’s been dead for seventy years?!