Reviews of previous Volante Opera recordings of the music of Paul Corfield Godfrey have continued to garner ecstatic reviews from critics, including the following in Fanfare from Marc Medwin: 'heretofore, I have been entirely ignorant of Paul Corfield Godfrey's work. The booklet includes an essay by the composer and complete texts of all the works. To complete the CD, we also present a further setting of Oscar Wilde in the shape of verses extracted from his narrative poem The Sphinx and a short cantata entitled Hymnus Mysticus based on poems by Aleister Crowley, another writer of the era whose unconventional lifestyle resulted in ostracism and exile. The work was originally written in 1976 but, apart from excerpts, has not been performedcomplete before now the recording was originally scheduled for the composer's seventieth birthday in 2020, but has been delayed by the recent pandemic. It features other soloists from Welsh National Opera, together with an orchestra drawn from live sampled performances which have been carefully balanced and adjusted in collaboration with the composer to obtain as close a result to the sound of an actual orchestra as possible, with results that Brian Wilson writing for MusicWeb International described as 'completely convincing'.

The text draws entirely from Wilde's original, without any additions from other sources, and lasts around three-quarters of an hour. This operatic fable, based on a fairy story by Oscar Wilde, highlights the differences between the diametrically opposed perceptions of Love represented by the emotionally committed world of nature and the artificial monetary valuations of society. Those who have enjoyed the contributions of Angharad Morgan as Lthien and Nienor to Paul Corfield Godfrey's cycle of epic scenes based on J R R Tolkien's The Silmarillion (as featured on recent Prima Facie CDs) will be delighted by her assumption of the title role in The Nightingale and the Rose by the same composer.

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