Ave Maria

Rebecca Clarke was born in Harrow in 1886 and died in New York City in 1979.She was one of the finest viola players of her day and a skilful composer who studied with Stanford at the Royal College of Music in London.Her output as a composer was small, comprising about 90 works, but all these pieces are brilliant and powerful. Her Piano Trio and Viola Sonata are often played and recorded, and are now widely regarded as masterpieces. However her songs are perhaps her finest body of works, and embrace a variety of styles from Blakean simplicity to brutal tragedy and outright farce.Rebecca Clarke's choral music was virtually unknown until Oxford University Press began to publish these works for the first time. She wrote for chorus and other vocal ensembles throughout virtually her whole career, from her earliest attempts at composition around 1906 to her final flowering in the 1940s, revising and recomposing until as late as 1976.

This music should enjoy a deserved circulation that it never received in the composer's lifetime. Some of the pieces are slight, but at their best they show Clarke engaged with an impressive range of historical models, from romantic part-song and madrigal through to glee, lute song and medieval carol, accomplished with a technical proficiency which shows her as a true pupil of Stanford.