Songs of Farewell

The BBC Singers perform Parry’s wartime laments for a lost age and reimagined hymns and antiphons from the Icelandic composer who has captured her country in music, Anna Thorvaldsdottir.

As the First World War tore through Europe and massacred thousands, the composer Charles Hubert Parry looked on in horror – incredulous that the Germany that produced his musical heroes could have invited such carnage. In despair of the violence and aware of his own imminent death too, Parry wrote his Songs of Farewell – six choral motets lined with nostalgia and full of grief-stricken profundity and surely the most moving scores he would write.

Daniel Hyde conducts them here, interspersed with the otherworldly sounds of keening, glacial choral works by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir.