Nestled amidst the large-scale musical works that define the accepted view of Hubert Parry as religious patriot are numerous songs that demonstrate the composer’s longstanding love of poetry, as well as his mastery of detail that brings the words to life. Jeremy Huw Williams and Paula Fan bring these beautiful songs to life on this engaging album from EM Records.

“My father was the most naturally unconventional man I have known. He was a Radical with a very strong bias against Conservatism.”, wrote Parry’s daughter Dolly some thirty years after his death, in hopes that “the extraordinary misinterpretation of him that exists should not persist.” Nonetheless, the image of Parry as a landed pillar of the establishment, the composer of such stalwarts of the repertoire as Jerusalem and I Was Glad, has remained fixed in the minds of most listeners. Only in the twenty years preceding the centenary of his death has light been shed on the contradictions between his musical and personal life, as reflected in his considerable body of work.

Parry turned to song throughout his life, beginning from his days at Eton in the 1860s to the year of his death in 1918. Harmony of Soul and Song (EMRCD053), a new recording of Parry’s songs by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams and pianist Paula Fan, commemorates the centenary of the composer’s death, by tracing the composer’s journey from some of his earliest efforts at song - Three Odes of Anacreon, in a world premiere recording - through his various returns to the genre over the course of more than half a century.