Gerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is 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.
Ernest Bristow Farrar was an English composer, pianist and organist.
Christopher "Kiffer" Finzi was a British orchestral conductor. He was the son of composer Gerald Finzi and artist Joyce Black.
Joy Finzi was a British artist and founder of the Finzi Trust, a foundation named for her husband, composer Gerald Finzi.
Dies Natalis, Op. 8, is a five-movement solo cantata composed in 1938–1939 by the twentieth-century English composer Gerald Finzi (1901–1956). It is a solo vocal cantata scored for a solo soprano or tenor accompanied by string orchestra, and features settings of four texts by Thomas Traherne (1636/37–1674), a seventeenth-century English Metaphysical poet, priest and theologian.
Herbert Whitton Sumsion was an English musician who was organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1928 to 1967. Through his leadership role with the Three Choirs Festival, Sumsion maintained close associations with major figures in England's 20th-century musical renaissance, including Edward Elgar, Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although Sumsion is known primarily as a cathedral musician, his professional career spanned more than 60 years and encompassed composing, conducting, performing, accompanying, and teaching. His compositions include works for choir and organ, as well as lesser-known chamber and orchestral works.
Finzi is a surname. Notable people with the name include:
Reginald Owen Morris, known professionally and by his friends by his initials, as R.O. Morris, was a British composer and teacher.
Wilfred Brown was an accomplished English tenor.
Michael John Hurd was a composer, teacher and author, principally known for his dramatic cantatas for schools and for his choral music.
Intimations of Immortality, Op. 29, an ode for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, is one of the best-known works by English composer Gerald Finzi. It is a setting of nine of the eleven stanzas of William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", cast as a single continuous movement of 45 minutes duration. Finzi began composing the work in the late 1930s, but did not complete it until 1950, just before it was performed on 5 September at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral, with Eric Greene as soloist and Herbert Sumsion conducting.
Paul Spicer is an English composer, conductor, and organist. He taught choral conducting at the Royal College of Music and conducted the RCM Chamber Choir between 1995 and 2008. Until his retirement in July 2022 he also taught at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and conducted their chamber choir which records for Somm Records. He also teaches at Oxford and Durham universities. Since 2004 he has been the conductor of the Petersfield Festival. He was Senior Producer for BBC Radio 3 for the Midlands Region based in Birmingham between 1984 and 1990 after which he moved to be artistic director of the Lichfield Festival. He also produced for various record companies over many years. He founded the Finzi Singers in 1984 making many recordings for Chandos Records. He conducts the Birmingham Bach Choir and the Whitehall Choir in London. His compositions include two oratorios for Easter and for Advent with libretti by the Dr Tom Wright and a choral symphony 'Unfinished Remembering' (2014) to a libretto by Euan Tait commemorating the outbreak of World War 1. He runs a series of choral courses under the banner of The English Choral Experience based mainly at Abbey Dore in Herefordshire.
Herbert Richard Lambert, FRPS, was a British portrait photographer known for his portrayals of professional musicians and composers including Gustav Holst.
Earth and Air and Rain is a song cycle for baritone and piano by Gerald Finzi (1901–56). It was composed between 1928 and 1935, and published in 1936 as his Op. 15. It consists of settings of ten poems by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).
William Busch was a British composer and musician. Busch studied music in London, Berlin and the United States. His composition teachers included John Ireland and Bernard van Dieren. He worked as a concert pianist before devoting himself more to music composition. But his pacifism during World War II resulted in decreased reception for his works during this time.
Stephen David Banfield is a musicologist, music historian and retired academic. He was Elgar Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham from 1992 to 2003, and then Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol from 2003 to his retirement at the end of 2012; he has since been an emeritus professor at Bristol.
The Newbury String Players was an English string orchestra founded in 1940 by the composer Gerald Finzi, to give concerts at a period, during the Second World War, when there was little live music. The members were mostly amateur players, with a few professional players.
By Footpath and Stile is a song cycle for baritone and string quartet by English composer Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) set to poems by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Composed between 1921 and 1922, it was first performed in 1923 and published in 1925.
Diana McVeagh is a British author on classical music. She has written a biography of Gerald Finzi and several books on Edward Elgar. McVeagh studied at the Royal College of Music in the 1940s and was assistant editor with Andrew Porter at The Musical Times. Since 2013 the North American British Music Studies Association awards a biennial Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music.
