The music of Gerald Finzi (1901–1956) is rooted in the tradition of Elgar, Parry and Vaughan Williams, but Bach was also a very significant influence for him. This album’s programme features the ‘Benedetto Marcello’ Chamber Orchestra under Flavio Emilio Scogna tackling the British composer’s complex personality with contextual awareness of the great trajectories of 20th-century musical thought.

The three Finzi masterpieces presented here – which the live aspect of the recording makes intimate, alive and present – reflect the pre-eminence of this singular composer in 20th-century British music. Far from the experimentation of the historical avant-garde, Finzi’s music is nevertheless also far from any backward-looking attempt at recovering relics from the past. The cantata Dies natalis, written over a long period of time between the mid-20s and 1938/9, is scored for strings and treble voice, setting verses by the 17th-century metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne (c.1636–1674).


Finzi had a natural affinity with the timbral quality of sounds, as is evident in the highly personal writing of his Clarinet Concerto (1948/9), dedicated to Frederick Thurston, the leading British clarinettist of his time, who first performed it at the Three Choirs Festival in September 1949 under the composer’s own direction. Since then, the work has established itself as one of the leading clarinet concertos of the 20th century. Here the intense and deep colours of the clarinet find in Roberta Gottardi’s interpretation an extraordinary expressiveness that is accompanied by limpid naturalness and intense lyricism.