CLASSICAL ICONOCLAST

" As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes ", so goes Psalm 103. This new recording, Flo...

Will Ivor Gurney at last receive the recognition he is due? His War Elegy received its Prom premiere at BBC Prom 20. Gurney's poetry...

The Fourth of August 1914, when Britain declared war on Germany. When war seemed a glamorous, jolly jape.  Lawrence Binyon's poem ...

Herbert Howells Hymnus Paradisi is not a rarity. Indeed, it's considered by some to be his masterpiece, extremely well known to those...

Ivor Gurney's secret love? It's known that Gurney became briefly engaged to the nurse Annie Drummond in 1917 but who was Margaret Hu...

There are strange Hells within the minds War made. Not so often, not so humiliating afraid As one would have expected - the racket and fea...

When I remember plain heroic strength And shining virtue shown by Ypres pools, Then read the blither written by knaves for fools In prai...

Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood On that most dearest Prelude of my delight. The low-lying mist lifted its hood, The October sta...

The big news at this year's Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester was the premiere of Ivor Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody. Gurney...

At the Three Choirs Festival, concerts start with prayers, which is a good thing, because it reminds us how lucky we are. Without music, bea...

Highnam Church is in Gloucestershire, on the estate where Hubert Parry grew up.,He learned to play the organ here as a small boy, and visit...

Gloucester 2010, the hip new tag for the 3 Choirs Festival, which started in 1719. The longest-running music festival in the world!  It bega...

June in Shropshire, by the banks of the river Teme, the perfect image of England in summer. The English Song Weekend takes place in Ludlow 3...

Chosen Hill in Gloucestershire is one of those "power spots" which attract creative energy. In the early 1920's, shy, repress...

Pamela Blevins' dual biography I vor Gurney and Marion Scott, Song of Pain and Beauty will be published by the Boydell Press in Novembe...