top

The Cloud of Unknowing

Francis Pott

The Cloud of Unknowing

James Gilchrist / Jeremy Filsell

Label: Signum Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0635212010525

barcode

Catalog number: SIGCD 105
Releasedate: 01-09-07

Following its successful premiere performance earlier this year, Francis Pott’s highly anticipated recording of The Cloud of Unknowing is likely to be musical milestone and a choral great.

Drawing together a variety of texts and musical influences, Pott weaves together a deep and emotional work with an ethos reminiscent of Michael Tippett’s ‘War Oratorio’.

"Jeremy Backhouse's excellent Vasari Singers performed it not just accurately, but with bags of heart and soul as well. A sincere, intelligent and admirably unsensational meditation on the darkness at the heart of man. The Cloud of Unknowing deserves a concert life beyond this moving performance." - The Times

Prologue (organ solo)

There where the sun first dwelt

Lord, thou hast been our refuge

Now, as though God were sighing

There where the sun first dwelt (reprise)

I was in the spirit on the Lord's day

And there went out another horse that was red

The cities that are burnt and consumed from the earth

For a nation is come up

All faces shall gather blackness

They that hate me without a cause (Tenor solo: Daniel Burges)

Divided sons, fight on

Behold a pale horse

Blessed be he that taketh their children

Dark earth, dark heavens [Interlude (organ solo)

Yesterday I was at work teaching Christ to lift his cross

The Lord is my shephe

For those men night was a more bitter day

My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Is this He that was transfigured

There they lie huddled

Clear sight shall never man have

For in the other life

In one little time may heaven be won and lost

Farewell, ghostly friend

The love in him was such