Finzi, Gerald: Two Motets

SATB/SSAATTBB and organ

I. Up to those bright and gladsome hills (SATB)
Words by Henry Vaughan (Psalm 121)

II. Sin! wilt thou vanquish me! (SSAATTBB)
Words by Thomas Traherne (The Recovery)

Written separately but published in one edition, these grand motets set to texts by two 17^th century poets bear the imprint of late Victorian and Edwardian choral music at its finest.

Henry Vaughan’s adaptation of verses from Psalm 121, Up to those bright and gladsome hills, is an appropriately uplifting setting and adopts the unusual time-signature of 7:4.

Thomas Traherne’s Sin! Wilt thou vanquish me! (The Recovery) takes its text from the poet’s ‘Centuries of Meditations’. Finzi’s triumphal setting, dedicated to Edward Bairstow, interprets Traherne’s questions rhetorically, leaving no doubt in his musical declarations that it is ‘Sin’ itself that will be destroyed.

Please note that this is an archive copy and is printed on demand.