THIS OTHER EDEN : KITTY WHATELY A Landscape of English Poetry & Song Joseph Middleton piano Navarra Quartet Kevin Whately Madelaine Newton www.champshillrecords.co.uk FOREWORD I am so delighted to have had the opportunity to make complemented the songs they would be programmed this very personal album of some of my very favourite alongside, with some of darker mood to balance the songs. English song is a genre in which I probably feel more cheerful and patriotic songs. most comfortable and ‘at home’; some of these songs I am so grateful to Mary and David Bowerman, and all at have been in my repertoire since I first started singing Champs Hill Records, for giving me this fantastic lessons at the age of 13, others I have taken great experience and for welcoming us into their home during delight in discovering during the preparation of this the recording week. To the superb Navarra Quartet for programme. There are settings of some of my most their hard work and wonderful enthusiasm during the beloved poets, and songs that take me straight to some recording of this disc. To Nigel Short and David Rowell, of my favourite places on the planet: the forests of and of course Joseph Middleton for working so hard with Bedfordshire where I grew up, the rolling hills of such attention to detail and patience. I’m so grateful to Sussex where I spent happy years as a member of the my parents, not only for their beautiful contribution to Glyndebourne chorus, the coasts of Northumberland this programme, but for their unending support for me where I spent childhood holidays, and Suffolk coasts throughout my training and now my career as a singer. and ‘wilds’ of Scotland where my partner and daughter To my singing teacher, Tim Evans Jones, for so much and I now spend our holidays. I am so lucky that I get help and support and guidance since we began working to travel a lot and see some beautiful countries. But I together in 2009. And to Anthony, who supports me am a home girl at heart, and this disc is an ode not endlessly in my neurotic and workaholic ways. just to my beloved British countryside, but to our wonderful wealth of British poets and composers. As my debut disc, I felt it was important to make something that really means something to me I had a fantastic time working with Joseph Middleton personally. A celebration of this beautiful genre, and of on this album. His playing is stunning, and we work the landscape of my home country, collaborating with really well together – striking a good balance of hard my parents, and featuring photographs of my daughter, work, enthusiasm, passion, and silly humour and Ivy, couldn’t be more meaningful to me. My family and I mutual love of food. We tried to pick a varied will treasure this disc and the unforgettable experiences programme, contrasting the pretty, simple and folk-like we had making it together, forever. pastoral songs with more dramatic and poignant pieces. Madelaine and Kevin and I looked for poems which TRACK LISTING THIS OTHER EDEN WILDS OF SCOTLAND 1 READING: RICHARD II, ACT 2 SCENE 1 ‘THIS SCEPTRE’D ISLE’ (KW) 00’50 19 LADY MACBETH: A SCENA Joseph Horovitz (1926 –) 08’31 (1564 –1616) William Shakespeare 20 I WISH AND I WISH Roger Quilter (1877 –1953) 02’14 2 EARTH’S CALL John Ireland (1879 –1962) 05’24 (with Magnus Johnston ~ violin and Brian O’Kane ~ cello) 3 MY OWN COUNTRY Peter Warlock (1894 –1930) 02.27 21 POEM: INTO MY HEART AN AIR THAT KILLS (KW) A. E. Housman 00’30 4 POEM: ENGLAND (MN) Walter de la Mare (1873 –1956) 00’53 22 THE CHILDREN James MacMillan (1959 –) 06’51 5 I WILL GO WITH MY FATHER A-PLOUGHING Roger Quilter (1877 –1953) 02’21 COASTS AND SEAS (with Magnus Johnston ~ violin and Brian O’Kane ~ cello) 23 POEM: O STAY AT HOME MY LAD AND PLOUGH (KW) A. E. Housman 00’31 FORESTS AND GARDENS 24 FOLK SONG: MA BONNY LAD 01’11 (KW) (1793 –1864) 6 POEM: IN HILLY-WOOD John Clare 00’58 25 POEM: THE SWIMMERS (MN) Louis Untermeyer (1885 –1977) 00’45 (1890 –1937) 7 THE SALLEY GARDENS Ivor Gurney 02’23 26 EARLY MORNING BATHE (piano solo) Benjamin Britten (1913 –1976) 02’32 8 WE'LL TO THE WOODS NO MORE Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 –1958) 01’42 (1900 –1976) (with Magnus Johnston ~ violin) 27 THE ESTUARY Michael Head 04’40 28 POEM: SEA FEVER (KW) John Masefield (1878 –1967) 01’07 9 POEM: THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS (MN) Wendell Berry (1934 –) 00’51 29 DOVER BEACH (with Navarra Quartet) Samuel Barber (1910 –1981) 07’52 10 KING DAVID Herbert Howells (1892 –1983) 05’02 11 POEM: THE DARKLING THRUSH (MN) Thomas Hardy (1840 –1928) 01’37 (KW) Kevin Whately (MN) 12 LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI Charles Villiers Stanford (1852 –1924) 06’06 Madelaine Newton MEADOWS AND FIELDS 13 SILENT NOON Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 –1958) 04’05 14 POEM: THE LAMBS OF GRASMERE (MN) Christina Rossetti (1830 –1894) 01’43 Total playing time: 81’53 15 A GREEN CORNFIELD Michael Head (1900 –1976) 02’17 16 SPRING WILL NOT WAIT (piano solo) (KW) John Ireland (1879 –1962) 03’58 Produced by Nigel Short Engineered, Mixed and Mastered by Dave Rowell 17 POEM: ALDESTROP (KW) Edward Thomas (1878 –1917) 00’55 Recorded on 7th –10th July 2014 in the Music Room, Champs Hill, West Sussex, UK Photographs by Natalie J Watts (Nataliejweddings.com) except where otherwise credited 18 THE FIELDS ARE FULL Ivor Gurney (1890 –1937) 01’37 Executive Producer for Champs Hill Records: Alexander Van Ingen Label Manager for Champs Hill Records: John Dickinson THIS OTHER EDEN Edward Thomas died on the first day of the Battle of Arras in April 1917, his life ended by the shockwaves of an exploding shell. Almost three years earlier the Anglo-Welsh poet expressed the precious essence of peace within the sublime tranquillity of an English country scene. Adelstrop , just sixteen lines long, evokes for many a timeless world, a Cotswold Eden barely touched, like Thoreau’s Walden , by modernity beyond its railway line. Adelstrop for one moment appears as the centre of the universe. And perhaps it is, a mythical place like Shakespeare’s Scepter’d Isle, the ‘blue remembered hills’ of Housman’s Shropshire or Hardy’s Wessex, the idyllic Ireland of Joseph Campbell’s I wish and I wish or the seashore at Dover long ago. The pain of longing for home, of true not sentimental nostalgia, deep seated in the art of the British Isles, permeates this album’s exquisite programme of poetry and song. So too do consoling thoughts of nature and the lived experience of being in nature, resting in ‘the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief’. Both strands interweave in Walter de la Mare’s England and Hilaire Belloc’s My own country , the latter’s emotional nuances and thoughts of home richly illuminated by the harmonies of Peter Warlock’s setting. Material possessions and personal status are not honoured here; rather it is the transcendent beauty of a bird’s song, the gift of springtime renewal, the shared stuff of common humanity – of life, love and death – that imprint their mark on the listener’s soul. These say the poets are what give life its meaning, intangible yet precious reminders of the individual’s connection to something bigger than self. The matter’s heart rests in the still silence of John Clare’s In Hilly-Wood , where the only sounds ‘that on peace intrude/ Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee’. Its pulse beats, too, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet Silent Noon , where the poet seeks to protect the perfect moment from passing time. Vaughan Williams’s setting, the second of six songs published in 1903 in his The House of Life , enfolds the ‘wing’d hour ... dropt ... from above’ in music that itself sounds destined to last planted there to revive ‘the ancient pulse of germ and birth’. Hardy’s guarded forever, ‘still as the hourglass’. optimism would soon be tested to destruction, mired in Flanders mud and later Vaughan Williams adopts a different stance to time in We’ll to the woods no more , hijacked to serve the cause of brutal dictators and anti-human ideologies. And yet from his Housman cycle, Along the Field , bidding a sad farewell to a moment that hope flickers in so many of the songs on this album, hope for peace and hope for can never be repeated. The song’s folk-like idiom and rhapsodic violin descant cast eternal values of beauty and truth. It stands proud in The fields are full , one of their haunting spell over Housman’s hymn to a vanished world. The idyll of rural life many fine songs written by Ivor Gurney in the fruitful post-war years following his also surfaces in Roger Quilter’s settings of Joseph Campbell’s I wish and I wish and I initial recovery from shellshock, and there too in John Ireland’s Earth’s Call , crafted will go with my father a-ploughing , originally scored for voice and piano trio and in 1918, a year of battles fought with malevolent intensity over the Western first published in Three Pastoral Songs in 1921, and in the folksong style of Ivor Front’s wilderness. Both works dwell far from life’s harsh realities. The fields are full Gurney’s The Salley Gardens .