Utwory na płycie:

• Prelude
• O thou, who com’st from Heaven’s king
• In the city of the Great God
• Bringer of rain
• Rushing northward
• See how all greet thee
• Behold the villages
• As the rain descends
• Tarry not, O cloud, tarry not
• Tarry not, O cloud
• And hark!
• Thou hast reached the snowy peaks
• And see! The Great God himself
• Chorus (Moderato maestoso) – Vivace
• When the dancers are weary
• Wait near her flower-covered window
• The Message (I, the bringer of the rain)
• Beloved!
• Five Partsongs_ 1 Dream Tryst
• Five Partsongs_ 2 Ye little birds
• Five Partsongs_ 3 Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee
• Five Partsongs_ 4 Now is the month of Maying
• Five Partsongs_ 5 Come to me

The Cloud Messenger, Op.30, H.111 (chamber version arr. Jospeh Fort)
Five Partsongs, Op. 12

In 1910, after seven years of work, Gustav Holst completed his choral-orchestral masterpiece,The Cloud Messenger. But following a disappointing premiere in 1913 the piece fell into obscurity, and has received only a handful of performances.

This crowning glory from the composer’s Sanskrit period deserves to be much better known. Telling the powerful ?fth-century story of an exiled yaksha who spies a passing cloud and sends upon it a message of love to his distant wife in the Himalayas, it is rich in its harmonic language and ingenious in its motivic construction, and points the way to Holst’s next major work,The Planets. This colourful chamber version by conductor Joseph Fort lends the more tender passages a new intimacy and clarity, while retaining much of the force of the original and laying the ground for a new life in performance.

A set of ?ve part songs, completed the year The Cloud Messenger was begun, shows the newly married Holst similarly absorbed by love’s trials and rewards.

---

Recorded on 9-11 June 2019 at All Hallows' Gospel Oak.