Psalm prelude
Herbert Howells - (1892-1983)
Howells achieved early recognition, firstly with a fairly substantial output of instrumental music and later with his songs which were coloured by the love of his native Gloucestershire. Despite his long life, severe health problems kept him out of the First World War. He married Dorothy in 1920. Howells seemed to have eschewed the more avant-garde experimentation with music that was taking place in Europe and America. He produced a tonal style, and it is said that he was gifted at 'creating metrically complex music that flows like the finest silk'. Notoriously over-sensitive to criticism, he perceived that his second piano concerto had not been well received and ceased composing for about ten years prior to the Second World War. He was also harshly critical of himself and did not release much of his finest work for a great many years, if at all. However, a number of sad events were, in the 1930s, to bring about work ranking in the top of the English choral tradition.
Howells inherited from Holst the position of Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith: he left this post in the early 1960s but continued composing and teaching composition well into his 80s. His ashes are entombed in Westminster Abbey.
Psalm prelude, set 1 no.1
Although not specifically a composer for the church, Howells has remained the quintessential English church composer of the twentieth century. The first set of psalm preludes was written between 1915-16 as three miniature tone poems which each comment on a particular verse from the Book of Psalms. The first of the set quotes Psalm 34, verse 6 Lo the poor crieth and the Lord heareth him, yea and saveth him out of all his troubles. Many of the features that came to characterise Howell's organ music can be seen here for the first time, but especially a clear architectural sweep from the still opening through the blazing and impassioned climax to the quietest of endings. The period when this work was written marked the first of several melancholic stages in the composer's life, when many of his friends were enduring the horrors of the First World War and something of this melancholy can be detected in the Psalm Prelude.
Programme notes compiled by Nicholas Shaw