Gerald Finzi: Bagatelles 3 & 4.

Gerald Raphael Finzi 1901 – 1956. A British composer, best known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata Dies natalis for solo voice and string orchestra, and his concertos for cello and clarinet.
Born in London, the son of John Abraham (Jack) Finzi and Eliza Emma (Lizzie) Leverson. Finzi became one of the most characteristically "English" composers of his generation. Despite being an agnostic of Jewish descent, several of his choral works incorporate Christian texts.

Finzi's father, a successful shipbroker, died just a fortnight short of his son's eighth birthday. Finzi was educated privately. During World War I the family settled in Harrogate, and Finzi began to study music at Christ Church, High Harrogate, under Ernest Farrar from 1915. Farrar, a former pupil of Stanford, was then aged thirty and he described Finzi as "very shy, but full of poetry".[Finzi found him a sympathetic teacher, and Farrar's death at the Western Front affected him deeply. During these formative years he also suffered the loss of all three of his brothers. These adversities contributed to Finzi's bleak outlook on life, but he found solace in the poetry of Thomas Traherne and his favourite, Thomas Hardy, whose poems, as well as those by Christina Rossetti, he began to set to music. In the poetry of Hardy, Traherne, and later William Wordsworth, Finzi was attracted by the recurrent motif of the innocence of childhood corrupted by adult experience. From the very beginning, most of his music was elegiac in tone.
He died soon aged 55, in the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, the first performance of his Cello Concerto on the radio having been given the night before. His ashes were scattered on May Hill near Gloucester.

On this video -
Bagatelles 3 - Carol / 4 - Forlana for Clarinet and String Orchestra,
The Five Bagatelles for clarinet and piano were completed in 1943 and subsequently arranged for clarinet and strings by Lawence Ashmore.
The images of lovely picturesque snowy English landscapes reflect the season with Christmas approaching.
Why not own this lovely album for keeps?
'Finzi Clarinet Concerto'
incl' Five Bagatelles Op 23a - Three Soliloquies from Love's Labours Lost'
Severn Rhapsody, Romance and Introit.
Robert Plane - Clarinet
Northern Sinfonia - Howard Griffiths
Naxos DDD 8.553566

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