Ronald Corp: Never Weather-Beaten Sail: SATB: Vocal Score

Among the UK's most noted choral composers and conductors Ronald Corp does not hesitate to bring his own musical vision to a much-loved poem by the sixteenth-century lutenist songwriter and 'Doctor of Physick' Thomas Campion following the example not only of Campion himself but also of Charles Wood and Hubert Parry. Eschewing the manner of Parry's resonant polyphony for a simple harmonised setting in a flexible verbal rhythm reflecting the measure of the words this is a heartfelt plea for spiritual release uttered in a quietly elegiac tone in which the serenity of the entreaty rather than its pathos is to the fore.