Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), Missa à 4 (1641)

Monteverdi’s long compositional career spanned sixty years and produced music of a great range of styles.  He brought his experience as an opera composer to his church music, giving it powerful emotional content and dramatic shapes.  This mass is a relatively small-scale piece composed near the end of his life, reminiscent of the imitative style of the Renaissance masses of Palestrina and Victoria, but also incorporating many musical features of baroque instrumental lines.

Adrian Batten (c. 1591–1637), O sing joyfully

Batten was a chorister at Winchester Cathedral before later becoming a Vicar Choral at Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral.  As well as singing and composing, he worked as a music copyist, and is responsible for preserving a great many pieces, both of his own and of his contemporaries.  Batten was instrumental in the development of the verse anthem, a distinctively English genre of the seventeenth century.

Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848–1918), My soul, there is a country

This is the first of Parry’s six ‘Songs of farewell’ composed late in life in 1916.  Written during the war each text deals with loss and grief, and yearning for a world without violence.