First thursday music spot: Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis in B Flat by CV Stanford

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was born to a prominent Anglo-Irish family in Dublin in 1852. At the age of 29 he became one of he founding professors at the Royal College of Music in London, where he taught composition for the rest of his life. Some very distinguished composers including Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughn-Williams were among his pupils.

He had a particularly enormous influence on English church music, and this setting of the canticles for evening prayer is still frequently sung in English cathedrals and churches, and indeed others round the world, today.





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