The splendour falls on castle walls - Frederick Delius, John Rutter, The Cambridge Singers

'The splendour falls on castle walls'
From the album Cambridge Singers A Cappella

Composer Frederick Delius
Conductor John Rutter
Choir The Cambridge Singers

https://smarturl.it/CambSingersACappella

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The splendour falls on castle walls
To music-lovers familiar with Benjamin Britten’s memorable setting of The splendour falls in his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, it may come as a surprise that Delius set the same words equally memorably twenty years earlier, in 1923. Both composers responded imaginatively to the line ‘the horns of Elfland faintly blowing’, Britten with a real horn, Delius by imitating the sound of horns with a male-voice semichorus that he directs to be placed apart from the main choir. Both composers stamped personal fingerprints on their settings, Britten with his favourite piled-up thirds, Delius with his gently sliding and elusive chromatic harmony. Delius’s setting, which deserves to be heard more often, was written for Charles Kennedy Scott’s Oriana Madrigal Society, which had given the first performance of Delius’s two pieces 'To be sung of a summer night on the water' three years earlier.

Cambridge Singers A Cappella
This album explores the great wealth of music written for unaccompanied choir in England, France and Germany during the Romantic era and into the twentieth century. The pure, distilled beauty of the a cappella medium inspired the composers heard on this album to some of their most poetic and delightful compositions.

John Rutter, English composer and conductor, is associated with choral music throughout the world. His recordings with the Cambridge Singers (the professional chamber choir he set up in 1981) have reached a wide global audience, many of them featuring his own music in definitive versions. Among John’s best-known choral works are Gloria, Requiem, Magnificat, Mass of the Children, and Visions, together with many church anthems, choral songs and Christmas carols.

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