The music of Hubert Parry has always been more popular in his native England than elsewhere, and it's easy after cursory listening to become lost in a snarl of chromaticism in the anthems and hymns heard here. This collection by the Choir of Westminster Abbey, recorded with by Hyperion with splendid transparency (a tough task with this composer) on the choir's home ground, makes an excellent place to start for those interested in understanding these British standards. One advantage is the enthusiastic set of notes by Jeremy ...
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The music of Hubert Parry has always been more popular in his native England than elsewhere, and it's easy after cursory listening to become lost in a snarl of chromaticism in the anthems and hymns heard here. This collection by the Choir of Westminster Abbey, recorded with by Hyperion with splendid transparency (a tough task with this composer) on the choir's home ground, makes an excellent place to start for those interested in understanding these British standards. One advantage is the enthusiastic set of notes by Jeremy Dibble, who provides one key when he writes, of Parry's setting of John Milton's Blest Pair of Sirens, that the composer "achieved an entirely personal fusion of his enthusiasms for Wagner (evident in the paraphrase of Die Meistersinger at the opening) and Brahms with a distinctly English style characterized by the use of a higher diatonic dissonance..." The noble melodies that emerge at the end of several of these pieces are indeed Brahmsian, but what leads up to them is not. The...
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