Who is gerald finzi

Yet when one listens to the works of both composers there is quite definitely a stylistic relationship. Ivor Gurney could have had no better executor of his artistic estate. He founded the Newbury String Players who were able to play many of his realisations from the 17 th century.

After the Second World War Finzi wrote some of his most adventurous orchestral works. The last major work was the Cello concerto , in which Finzi was pushing the barriers- not only was it considerably longer than anything he had previously written apart from the Intimations it was more passionate and intense. There were new harmonies and part writing here.

Gerald Finzi was diagnosed as having Hodgkinson's Disease in Unfortunately there were children with chickenpox in the house. Finzi contracted the disease. Due to his weakened state it caused severe brain inflammation. He died on 27 th September , aged 55 years. Strangely this was the very day after the first performance of his Cello Concerto. He seems to have been at his best writing small-scale works.

However, his two masterpieces are in fact his two longest. He had no problem in developing ideas. His general musical style is elegiac. His music is frankly sad and autumnal. There is little that is light hearted or joyous. While he is especially famous as a song-writer, for his sensitive settings of poets such as Hardy and Wordsworth, he also wrote in other genres; notable works includethe exquisite cantata Dies Natalis , and his cello concerto.

He also exerted a major influence in the musical world as a whole, championing the neglected Ivor Gurney and reviving eighteenth-century composers with the amateur orchestra he founded. In this lively and sensitive study of his life and works, Diana McVeagh, the renowned Elgar and Finzi scholar, has made use of interviews with the main figures in his life, correspondence with contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, Howard Ferguson and Herbert Howells, and her access to previously unpublished material in the form of his widow, Joy's, unpublished journal.

The Finzithat emerges is a multi-faceted and complex character. The author shows how he developed from a solitary, introverted youth into a man with strong views and a myriad of interests: everything from education, pacifism, vegetarianism, to the Arts and Crafts movement, the English pastoral tradition, English apple varieties, and the significance of ancestry, friendship and marriage in an artist's life.

In , Finzi learned that he was suffering from the then incurable Hodgkin's disease and had at most ten years to live. Something of his feelings after this revelation is probably reflected in the agonized first movement of the deeply moving Cello Concerto , his last major work. In , following an excursion with Vaughan Williams, Finzi developed shingles. He died not much later in an Oxford hospital, the first performance of his Cello Concerto on the radio having been given the night before.

He was played by David Morrissey pictured right in the film, Hilary and Jackie. See more Finzi Music. See more Finzi Album Reviews. Discover Music. Move to Harrogate Young Gerald was only 7 when his father died. Tragic events The shy teenager found Farrar a good and sympathetic teacher.

Finzi was passionate about music of this period and created performing editions of works by English baroque composers including Capel Bond, Richard Mudge, John Stanley, William Boyce and Charles Wesley. Finzi made these editions for the Newbury String Players, an amateur orchestra he founded in and which also acted as a platform for some young composers, Kenneth Leighton among them, whose early suite, Veris Gratia , was dedicated to Finzi in gratitude for his help and encouragement.

It was an intimate, almost private form of expression through which he could explore his deep love of the English language and especially its poetry. Finzi claimed that he did not choose the poems he set to music but they chose him. Its intimacy of expression draws the sensitive listener into a highly personal world. Behind what curtain were ye hid from me so long?