The Choral Music of Peter Warlock 7

In this seventh volume of Warlock’s Choral works, there is a mixture of work. The Full Heart sets poetry of Warlock’s friend Robert Nicholas and is written for eight-part Chorus with a Soprano solo. A Cornish Christmas Carol is one of two Cornish carols Warlock wrote. This one is for Chorus SATB with SA divisi and a solo Soprano moment toward the end. Corpus Christi, written in 1919, requires contrAlto solo and Tenor solo from the choir, with an extremely demanding part for the contrAltos. The three dirges, All the Flowers of Spring, Call for the Robin Redbreast and The Wren and The Shrouding of the Duchess of Malfi were originally published as a set, but are performed separately. The first is for mixed Chorus SATB, the second SSAA and the third TTBB with a first Tenor line of almost unequalled challenge.

Composer, writer and musical scholar Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) was active in the early decades of the twentieth century, when he distinguished himself by his rediscovery and transcription of early English music, his writing on Delius, Gesualdo and other many other musicians, and for his Choral works and songs, among them the carol Bethlehem Down.