Parry's Songs of Farewell were composed over the final decade of his life. The elegaic tone of the Songs may also reflect a sense of loss caused by the First World War - in which some of Parry's most promising students at the Royal College of Music lost their lives - and a decline in national confidence, expressed in a different manner in Parry's famous Jerusalem of 1916. The motets are among Parry's most eloquent and concise works, demonstrating his famous contrapuntal skill and assimilation of the music of Mendelssohn and Brahms.
This new edition is the first to offer a critical assessment of the autograph manuscripts, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It includes a significant earlier version of a section of the fourth motet, 'There is an old belief', and offers a rescored opening to the fifth motet, 'At the round earth's imagined corners', together with notes on performance.
The scoring of these unaccompanied motets ranges from SATB to SATB double choir.
- ISBN: 9780193518469 (0193518465)
