Saturday 19 February 2022 Evensong

This service features music by four English composers: Byrd, Sumsion, Finzi and Howells. The anthem, Finzi's 'Lo, the full, final sacrifice', is a piece of epic proportions. Finzi used excerpts from two poems by poet Richard Crashaw, who in turn based these poems on a work by St Thomas Aquinas. The following is an excerpt of the poem, which Finzi partly sets as a duet between tenor and bass:

"O soft self-wounding Pelican!

Whose breast weeps balm for wounded man.

All this way bend thy benign flood

To a bleeding heart that gasps for blood.

That blood, whose least drops sovereign be

To wash my worlds of sins from me."