Finzi’s For St Cecilia at First Night of the Proms
Gerald Finzi’s ode to the patron saint of music, For St Cecilia, provides the finale of the First Night of the 2026 BBC Proms on 17 July, with BBC forces conducted by Dalia Stasevska.
Close to 80 years after its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in 1947, Gerald Finzi’s ode for voices and orchestra, For St Cecilia, returns to the same London venue to close the First Night of the Proms programme on 17 July. Dalia Stasevska conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Chorus, with New Zealand tenor Thomas Atkins. The concert is broadcast live on BBC Two TV, BBC Radio 3 and will be available streamed on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds.
Finzi’s 20-minute ode sets texts by poet and close collaborator Edmund Blunden, paying tribute to the patron saint of music and her inspiration for generations of composers including Byrd, Purcell and Handel. The opening and close include celebratory fanfares and exultant choral writing, drawing on the tradition of Elgar and Parry, with a touch of Walton’s ceremonial mode in the orchestration. The centre of the work is more rhapsodic, with choir and tenor soloist referencing a list of saints including St Valentine and St Swithin, as well as St Cecilia. Finzi’s characteristic fingerprints abound with ecstatic lyricism, masterly choral writing, thrilling harmonic shifts, and contrapuntal underpinning.
For St Cecilia is dedicated to fellow composer Howard Ferguson who wrote to Finzi after the premiere, describing it as “a real beauty… to me it seems much larger in musical scope and intention than anything you have yet written!... beauty and sensitivity were always there…but now you’ve added real size to them without, moreover, spoiling the one or the other. It’s a very great achievement.’ Musical Times summed it up as “a setting at once dignified, festal and melodious in his characteristically lyrical vein.”
As well as the full orchestral version available from Boosey & Hawkes on rental, the work can be performed with organ accompaniment in a reduction by Robert Gower, available on sale. The first recording of this version is released by Hyperion to co-incide with the Proms performance, featuring the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge conducted by Steven Grahl (CDA68487). The disc also features In terra pax with Robert Gower’s organ reduction, and Requiem da camera with Francis Jackson’s reduction.
> View the full score
> View the organ reduction
The full symphonic version of For St Cecilia can be heard in two distinguished recordings. The 1979 ARGO recording is available in Decca’s British Music Collection, with tenor soloist Phillip Langridge and the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Richard Hickox (Decca 4688072). In 2006 Naxos released its version with soloist James Gilchrist and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under David Hill (Naxos 8557863).
> Listen on Spotify: Trinity Cambridge / LSO / Bournemouth
> Further information on Work: For St Cecilia
Photo: Boosey & Hawkes