Charles Villiers Stanford

Communion Service B Flat Op.10

The B Flat Morning and Evening Service and Office for the Holy Communion was composed while Stanford was Organist and Master of the Choristers of Trinity College, Cambridge, and was already established as a composer and theenergetic conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society. It is for his church music that Stanford is best remembered and this first offering demonstrates his gifts very well. Charles Villiers Stanford was an Irishcomposer, music teacher and conductor who was a founder of the Royal Academy of Music, teaching composition to some of the greatest British composers of the twentieth century, among them Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. His own composition always displayed technical mastery, and for a while he was a great figure in the world of British musical theatre.