Julius (Allen Greenway) Harrison (26/03/1885 - 05/04/1963), an English composer, born in Stourport (Worcestershire). He studied with Bantock in Birmingham and had conducting experience as assistant to Nikisch and Weingartner in 1914 and, after the war, with the Beecham Opera Company, the BNOC (1922-7), the Handel Society and the Scottish Orchestra, but he is best remembered in this field for his work as Permanent Conductor of the Hastings Municipal Orchestra between 1930 and 1940. Though he was never popular with his players, he made the Hastings Orchestra second only to Bournemouth among the resort orchestras, then in their heyday. He recorded with them including his own Song of Adoration. He virtually retired from conducting in 1940 partly because of the war situation and partly because of increasing deafness, but this enabled him to devote himself full time to composition. Even at that time his works were numerous. Most ambitious perhaps was his choral music.
| Author: | Philip L. Scowcroft |
Requiem for Archangels
| Period: | Expressionism |
| Composed in: | 1919 |
A short choral piece for SATB.
| Author: | Philip L. Scowcroft |
Requiem mass
| Period: | Modernism |
| Composed in: | 1957 |
| Musical form: | mass |
| Text/libretto: | Latin mass |
| Duration: | 82' |
Requiem for chorus, soloists and ensemble/orchestra. Duration: 82 minutes.
Shorter vocal pieces (see above) were followed in the forties and fifties by Psalm 100 and three masses, the Mass in C, twice broadcast in 1952 and 1955, the much shorter Missa Liturgica (1950) and the Requiem mass, first performed in 1957 at the Worcester Three Choirs Festival, where I heard and enjoyed it, feeling it to be not too overshadowed by the Elgar works in the Festival that centenary year and indeed its chromatic invention was not more advanced or violently different in idiom from the music of his fellow Worcestershireman. By then Harrison’s music seemed decidedly conservative.
| Author: | Philip L. Scowcroft |