Dearest Dave,

Here is ‘Dies Natalis'. I have marked fairly fully Nos. 1, 2 & 5; but 4, the Arioso, defeats me utterly. I can feel a general emotional rise and fall in it, but I cannot for the life of me feel the harmonic ‘breathing places’ that condition phrasing: it just seems to move on and on without ever sitting down. If you had marked the phrasing I could have put in the dynamics; but as I do not seem to have the wit to disentangle the phrasing for myself, and as I cannot do the dynamics without it, I must leave both to you. The few points I have put in are things I feel definitely; but they are more or less shots in the dark, so don't go by them. I am so sorry to be obtuse about this. As you know, I have never liked the Arioso as much as the rest, and I think the reason must be that I have never been able to follow it clearly. I has seemed like a beautiful but somewhat inchoate piece of emotional illustration. Doubtless I am wrong about this; but that, for present purposes, is beside the point. And I still feel that it belongs to the period when you relied, as I see it, too much on emotional rise and fall as a means of giving shape to a work, and not enough on a synthesis between emotional rise and fall and purely musical shapes, such as you have now so successfully achieved. But though I feel this very strongly, I do not expect you to agree with me.

I enjoyed listening to the two sets of part-songs very much. They came through only moderately well as far as transmission was concerned. In some way they seemed to require more air and space than they got; for though they were not exactly hurried, yet they needed more spaciousness and loving-care of detail. I shall be very interested to hear the records and to know how they wear. Incidentally, I think the number of singers - eight - is typical of the B.B.C.'s genius for compromise. Songs in four parts would sound infinitely better sung by four people or by sixteen: eight is the worst choice possible, for you can always hear the two individual voices wobbling.