Some Interesting Facts about Gerald Finzi...

The next event in our Concert Series, English Serenade, takes place in a few weeks time at St. Lawrence Church, Hungerford. In the run up to it we thought we'd explore the composers that are featured a bit further. This week we've been looking at Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)... So here a few things you might not have known about him:

• Of Gerald’s three brothers and one sister, only his sister Kate lived past the First World War. His brother Felix committed suicide in India in 1913, Douglas died of pneumonia contracted while at Bradford College in 1912, and Edgar died in action on September 3, 1918. Preceding the early deaths of his brothers, Gerald’s father Jack Finzi died just before Gerald’s eighth birthday. These deaths coupled with the death in 1918 of Ernest Farrar, also killed in action, with whom Finzi studied from 1914 to 1916 and who acted as a father figure for him, helped to confirm Finzi's introverted nature. His reaction to this multiple loss was to turn to literature and poetry, forces that would shape much of his life.
• He worked on behalf of the celebrated war poet and composer Ivor Gurney, cataloguing and editing his work for publication. Gurney has suffered a nervous breakdown after WW1 and had been in mental institutions since 1922. Finzi would be the driving force behind Gurney's Music & Letters symposium and the eventual publication of five volumes of songs and two collections of poems.
• He saved a number of rare varieties of English apples from extinction.
• In 1939, during the dark war years, he founded Newbury String Players, an amateur chamber orchestra, which he would conduct until his death in 1956. With Arts Council funding and a small petrol allowance, it became a mobile music body, offering performance opportunities to talented young musicians and taking music wherever it was wanted across the South of England.
• During the war years he opened his house in Ashmansworth, Hampshire to a number of German and Czech refugees.
• The outbreak of WW2 delayed the first performance of Dies Natalis at the Three Choirs Festival, which could have established Finzi as a major composer much sooner.

Andrew Dickinson, winner of the Hampshire Singing Competition, performs Finzi's Dies Natalis with Southern Sinfonia on Friday 15 March 2013 at St. Lawrence Church, Hungerford. 

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