ALSO on Signumclassics

112booklet 13/11/07 11:07 Page 1 ALSO on signumclassics Remember Your Lovers On Buying a Horse Moonstruck Songs by Tippett, Britten, Purcell & Pelham Humfrey The songs of Judith Weir Songs of FG Scott John Mark Ainsley / Iain Burnside Susan Bickley / Andrew Kennedy / Ailish Tynan Lisa Milne / Roderick Williams / Iain Burnside SIGCD066 Iain Burnside SIGCD096 SIGCD087 Songs from the Pleasure Garden A Purse of Gold Philip Langridge / David Owen Norris Irish Songs by Herbert Hughes SIGCD101 Ailish Tynan / Iain Burnside SIGCD106 Available through most record stores and at www.signumrecords.com For more information call +44 (0) 20 8997 4000 112booklet 13/11/07 11:07 Page 3 ON WENLOCK EDGE ON WENLOCK EDGE SONGS BY RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, IVOR GURNEY & IAN VENABLES It is a remarkable sign of insecurity that a the older composer. On his return to England composer with so many social advantages, a Vaughan Williams recalled, ‘I came back with a On Wenlock Edge Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) thorough musical training (under Parry, Stanford bad attack of French fever and wrote a string 1. On Wenlock Edge [3.40] and Wood in England and Bruch in Germany), and quartet which caused a friend to say that I must 2. From far, from eve and morning [2.11] with a growing reputation should, at the age of have been having tea with Debussy’. That this was 3. Is my team ploughing [3.39] thirty-five, seek yet further study abroad with a an important step for Vaughan Williams is shown 4. Oh, when I was in love with you [0.44] composer three years younger than himself. by his restored confidence and the release of a 5. Bredon Hill [7.19] Despite the successful première of his setting for creative energy that was to produce a number of 6. Clun [3.28] chorus and orchestra of Walt Whitman’s Toward significant works in the next few years including Ludlow and Teme Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) the Unknown Region at the Leeds Festival in his first major achievement: the Fantasia on a 7. When smoke stood up from Ludlow [3.27] October 1907 Vaughan Williams came to the theme by Thomas Tallis. 8. Fair in a western brookland [5.08] conclusion that his work needed more refinement 9. ‘Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town [1.20] because it ‘had come to a dead end and that a This new sense of confidence is immediately 10. Ludlow Fair [2.14] little French polish would be of use’. After apparent in two works that received their first 11. On the idle hill of summer [3.05] consulting Delius and a number of friends on performance at London’s Aeolian Hall on 15th 12. When I was one and twenty [1.21] which French composer to choose (Vincent D’Indy November 1909 in a programme jointly promoted 13. The Lent Lily [3.30] had been suggested) it was eventually Ravel to by Vaughan Williams and the celebrated tenor Songs of Eternity and Sorrow Op.36 Ian Venables (b.1955) whom Vaughan Williams turned for help. In Gervais Elwes. These were the G minor String 14. Easter Hymn [6.38] January the following year he arrived in Paris, Quartet and the song-cycle On Wenlock Edge. In 15. When green buds hang in the elm like dust [3.00] staying in an uncomfortable hotel without a piano, setting six poems from A Shropshire Lad, first 16. Oh who is that young sinner? [2.33] and went to see Ravel four or five times a week for published in 1896 at his own expense, by the late 17. Because I liked you better [4.25] the next three months. Victorian poet A. E. Housman, Vaughan Williams was to move in a strikingly new direction, not least Total Timings [57.49] Although it was mainly the orchestration of piano in the innovative scoring for tenor, piano and ANDREW KENNEDY TENOR, SIMON CRAWFORD-PHILlIPS PIANO scores that Vaughan Williams practised during his string quartet. This chamber combination had not DANTE QUARTET studies with Ravel, it was the exposure to French been previously explored by English composers, www.signumrecords.com (and Russian) music that clearly left its mark on and while Vaughan Williams may possibly have - 3 - 112booklet 13/11/07 11:07 Page 5 known Chausson’s song Chanson Perpétuelle (also assume a more chilling aspect as summer turns following Arthur Somervell’s first Shropshire lad reveal an astonishing confidence and maturity, with piano quintet) via his lessons with Ravel, On to winter and the presence of death haunts the cycle for baritone and piano that appeared in something that the slow-developing Vaughan Wenlock Edge is an expansive work that, in its remainder of this extended dramatic setting. 1904. Housman famously disliked composers Williams simply could not have matched when he emotional breadth has an organic, almost Equally dramatic is the dialogue between the setting his poems (although he never refused was in his twenties. symphonic quality. ghost of a dead soldier and the young man who them permission) and complained that Vaughan has appropriated his sweetheart in Is my team Williams had removed two verses from Is my team Before music college, and not long after What is also apparent and highly significant (just ploughing? The contrast between the sepulchral ploughing? The lines, ‘The goal stands up, the completing his years as a chorister at Gloucester as in the String Quartet) is the guiding hand of questions and the vibrant answers from the living keeper/ Stands up to keep the goal’ does Housman Cathedral, Gurney discovered A.E. Housman and Ravel. His influence seems to have removed the world is brilliantly effective. So too is the rapt little favour and their deletion by Vaughan in 1908 set his On your midnight pallet; the same ‘lumpy and stodgy’ textures that Vaughan atmosphere created by the harp-like piano chords Williams is surely an act of kindness. year attempting Is my team ploughing?, a song he Williams had criticised in his own earlier works and a recitative-like melodic line that frame the later revised. (with its echoes of Brahms and Parry) and is, in gentle From far, from eve and morning. Light, Ludlow and Teme On Wenlock Edge, now replaced by a more transparent textures are a feature of Oh, when I As someone who possessed the exceptional gift of transparent, lighter touch with the addition of was in love with you where a dancing piano A year after Ivor Gurney arrived at the Royal being equally talented as both composer and poet, ‘several atmospheric effects’. The first of these accompaniment underpins playful pizzicato string College of Music on a scholarship in 1911 to study Gurney was naturally drawn to the poetry of others ‘effects’ is heard in the nervous rhythms (with the chords. In the final song, Clun, (written as early as composition under Stanford, his near contemporary but rarely set his own poems, unlike his fellow composer’s characteristic triplet figuration and 1906) Housman’s calm acceptance of death is Herbert Howells recalled that he had a ‘wallet Englishman Thomas Campion (1567-1620) - also parallel fourths) of the opening storm scene of the matched by music that forms a delicate epilogue bulging with works of many kinds. There were doubly gifted as poet/composer - whose lute song title song. Fiery piano and string gestures vividly to the cycle. piano preludes thick with untamed chords; violin texts were always taken from his own words. evoke Housman’s ‘gale of life’ that has always sonatas strewn with ecstatic crises; organ During the war years when life in the trenches troubled men’s lives. Particularly atmospheric and The rhythms and melodic contours inherent in works which he tried out amidst Gloucester’s made writing music almost impossible it was harmonically arresting is the accompaniment to Housman’s poems, idealised in a kind of half- imperturbable pillars’. Songs are also likely to poetry that pre-occupied Gurney and in 1917 his Bredon Hill (actually in the poet’s native imagined Shropshire landscape, and his recurring have been there, considering his poetic leanings first collection of poems, Severn and Somme, was Worcestershire, not Shropshire) where rich string themes of loss, death and a rural nostalgia made and early vocal settings. By 1914 Gurney had published (the second being War’s Embers that sonorities of piled up chords beautifully capture his work a natural gift for composers wishing to completed his first important collection; Five followed two years later). However, a handful of both the tolling bells and the summer languor of ‘shake hands across the arts’. His poetry Elizabethan Songs (originally for the intriguing songs were written during this period and include Housman’s poem. After the cheerful pealing of the eventually enjoyed a widespread circulation combination of mezzo-soprano, pairs of flutes, In Flanders and Dinny Hill, (with verses written by bells (themselves an image for birth, marriage (particularly during the Great War) and became clarinets and bassoons and harp), setting texts by his school friend Will Harvey) which express a and death) for piano alone in the third verse, they increasingly popular with British composers Shakespeare, Nashe and Fletcher. These songs longing for his Gloucestershire. In addition to - 4 - - 5 - 112booklet 13/11/07 11:07 Page 7 these songs Gurney set further Housman verses: seven verses for an identical ensemble, completing Housman’s lines in the right order. Tensions are Ludlow and Teme is performed here in the new On Wenlock Edge. This seems to have been Ludlow and Teme in just a few weeks.

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