SRCD.238 STEREO ADD Patrick Hadley THE TREES SO HIGH PATRICK HADLEY (1899-1973) The Trees so High Gerald Finzi Symphonic Ballad in A minor INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY 1 1. Adagio (10’58”) 3 3. Vivace (5’04”) 2 2. Andante tranquillo (4’38”) 4 4. Adagio – ‘The Trees so High’ (13’26”) Vernon Handley soloists Thomas Allen & Ian Partridge (34’07”) Thomas Allen (baritone) New Philharmonia Orchestra • Guildford Philharmonic Choir & Orchestra Guildford Philharmonic Choir • New Philharmonia Orchestra (leader Carl Pini) conducted by Vernon Handley GERALD FINZI (1901-1956) Intimations of Immortality * Ode for tenor solo, chorus and orchestra 5 1. Prelude (4’45”) 10 6. V: Our birth is but a sleep… (3’45”) 6 2. I: There was a time when… (4’05”) 11 7. VI: Earth fills her lap… (1’34”) 7 3. II: The Rainbow comes & goes (2’34”) 12 8. IX: O joy! that in our embers… (7’55”) 8 4. III: Now, while the birds… (3’50”) 13 9. X: Then sing, ye Birds sing… (3’30”) 9 5. IV: Ye blessèd Creatures… (6’26”) 14 10. XI: And O, ye Fountains… (4’41”) (43’12”) Ian Partridge (tenor) Guildford Philharmonic Choir & Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley Total playing time (77’19”) The above individual timings will normally each include two pauses. One before the beginning of each movement or work, and one after the end. ൿ 1979 *ൿ 1975 The copyright in these sound recordings is owned by Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. This compilation and the digital remastering ൿ 2007 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. © 2007 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Lyrita is a registered trade mark. Made in the UK LYRITA RECORDED EDITION. Produced under an exclusive license from Lyrita by Wyastone Estate Ltd, PO Box 87, Monmouth, NP25 3WX, UK X XI Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, And let the young Lambs bound Forebode not any severing of our loves! As to the tabor’s sound! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your, might; We in thought will join your throng, I only have relinquished one delight Ye that pipe and ye that play, To live beneath your more habitual sway. he name and music of Patrick Hadley have never been widely known to musical Ye that through your hearts to-day I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Tpeople even in the British Isles. He lived his statutory three-score years and ten, Feel the gladness of the May! Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; and more, and was musically active for most of them, but he composed hardly more What though the radiance which was once so bright The innocent brightness of a new-born Day than a handful of works, and did not cultivate the limelight. He was, on the other hand, Be now for ever taken from my sight, Is lovely yet; a familiar figure for several decades in Cambridge, where he was born, had part of his Though nothing can bring back the hour The Clouds that gather round the setting sun musical training, held a lectureship and finally was Professor of Music (the senior post Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; Do take a sober colouring from an eye in the University’s Music Faculty); also at the Royal College of Music in London, where We will grieve not, rather find That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; he studied and later taught; and in Norfolk on the east coast of England where his Strength in what remains behind; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. family home was near King’s Lynn at Heacham, to which he retired in 1962 and where In the primal sympathy Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Which having been must ever be; Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, he died. In the soothing thoughts that spring To me the meanest flower that blows can give His father was Master of a Cambridge University college, and Hadley was content Out of human suffering; Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. to spend his working life as an academic musician.Yet all who knew him will agree that In the faith that looks through death, he was far from the type of man or musician which the world calls academic. Nor does In years that bring the philosophic mind. his music sound as correct, conservative, faceless as that of the typical academic composer: it is as eccentric and passionate as he was, and as one might guess from his preference in opera for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Puccini’s La Boheme. He knew the musical classics, and pre-classics, well; he was familiar with the modern music of www.lyrita.co.uk his day, certainly as far as Benjamin Britten. He was proud of his maternal Irish Note © 1975 & 1979 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England ancestry, and it may have contributed to the unconventionality that friends and pupils Digital Remastering Engineer: Simon Gibson loved in him; in 1958 he composed a cantata entitled Connemara. But he was also a The original recording of The Trees so High was made in association with the RVW Trust. proud Englishman, inspired by the folksong revival (as The Trees so High makes clear), The original recording of Intimations of Immortality was made in association with the RVW & a devoted disciple and friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams (who, in turn, arranged FINZI TRUSTS. Hadley’s cantata Fen and Flood for mixed chorus and orchestra). His Norfolk background, flat and windswept landscape adjoining the North Sea, may be heard in Cover Design:Turner’s Scene on the Thames is reproduced by courtesy of the TRUSTEES OF much of his music, a Fenman’s response to Sibelius and to the Nordic side of Delius THE BRITISH MUSEUM (the Grieg acolyte of The Song of the High Hills, for example), and also a Fenman’s defiance which found expression in music which refuses to be pigeonholed “School of WARNING Copyright subsists in all Lyrita Recordings. Any unauthorised broadcasting. public Vaughan Williams”, or School of Anybody Else. performance, copying, rental or re-recording thereof in any manner whatsoever will constitute an infringement of such copyright. In the United Kingdom licences for the use of recordings for public Although by no means his first composition, it was The Trees so High which performance may be obtained from Phonographic Performance Ltd., 1 Upper James Street, London, brought Hadley’s name to public notice, and which set the tone for his later major W1F 9DE 2 11 V For that which is most worthy to be blest; — Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: Delight and liberty, the simple creed The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, compositions, all of them vocal. He completed it in 1931 and himself conducted the first Hath had elsewhere its setting, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: — performance, by Cambridge University Musical Society on 10 June 1932, which was And cometh from afar: Not for these I raise favourably received although one may infer that the piece made heavy demands on Not in entire forgetfulness, The song of thanks and praise; amateur performers of those days. It was brought to London, and professional And not in utter nakedness, But for those obstinate questionings performance, by Adrian Boult in 1934, and made some impression, since it showed that But trailing clouds of glory do we come Of sense and outward things, a traditional melody could, notwithstanding contrary opinion (e.g. Constant Lambert’s From God, who is our home: Fallings from us, vanishings; dictum of a few years later, “The only thing you can do with a folksong is to play it Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Blank misgivings of a Creature Shades of the prison-house begin to close Moving about in worlds not realised, again, and play it rather louder”, presumably a reference to Delius’s Brigg Fair), be Upon the growing Boy, High instincts before which our mortal Nature made the thematic basis of a four-movement symphony. Hadley at one time described But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised: The Trees so High as a Symphony in A minor, but later settled for “Symphonic Ballad” He sees it in his joy; But for those first affections, thus, unbeknowst, allying it with Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, a then forgotten work of The Youth, who daily farther from the east Those shadowy recollections, an earlier decade. Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, Which, be they what they may, For the countryman, human life is determined by the changing climate of the four And by the vision splendid Are yet the fountain light of all our day, seasons, a well-known topic for musical composition. For the symphonist, integrity is Is on his way attended; Are yet a master light of all our seeing; determined by unity of idea, transformed and diversified in several circumstances of At length the Man perceives it die away, Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make pace and mood.The poem of “The Trees they grow so high” shows how its hero quickly And fade into the light of common day. Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, moved from boyhood to marriage, to fatherhood, and to the grave, another four VI To perish never; contrasts.