Gerald Finzi made a significant contribution to British twentieth-century song and choral repertoire. His acute awareness of the frailty of existence had already found its musical expression in his settings of Thomas Hardy (Naxos 8.557644), before he began his Intimations of Immortality in the late 1930s. Set to nine of the eleven stanzas of Wordsworth’s Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Finzi’s Intimations is a deeply touching lament for the passing of the instinctive, intuitive freshness of childhood. His Ode for St Cecilia is an exultant paean honoring music’s patron saint.