Time and Space : Holst, Vaughan Williams, Mary Bevan, Roderick Williams

Time and Space - songs by Holst and Vaughan Williams, with Mary Bevan, Roderick Williams, William Vann and Jack Liebeck, new from Albion, highlighting the close personal relationship between the two composers. As the label is an offshoot of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, its choices are eclectic rather than mainstream, but illuminate aspects of Vaughan Williams' life and work which might not otherwise be covered in mass market releases. While Albion's first collection "Heirs and Rebels" presented archive recordings of well known songs by Holst and Vaughan Williams, the choices on this recording places less familiar songs - some unpublished -  by each composer beside each other for comparison and also their settings of the same texts.

Holst's fascination with visionary themes can be glimpsed in "Invocation to Dawn", from Holst's Six Songs Op15 H68 (1902-3). This was the first of his settings of his own translation from Sanskrit.  It's contemporary with his The Mystic Trumpeter (1904 rev. 1912), and works like Savitri Op 25 and the Choral Hymns to the Rig Veda Op. 26 (1908-12). While neither Holst nor RVW were conventionally religious, the ardent vocal line and rolling piano part in this song connects to transcendental themes prevalent in that era.   Holst includes three settings of Thomas Hardy, "In a Wood", "Between Us Now",  and "The Sergeant's Song", which text Vaughan Williams also used in Buonaparty (1908), which can be heard on the recent "The Song of Love" album, also from Albion. (Please read my review here). Holst's version is animated, more attuned to the irreverent satire in the poem, with Roderick Williams at his idiomatic best.  The suppressed passion in "I will not let thee go", to a poem by Robert Bridges might remind some of Vaughan Williams’ Silent Noon, from 1904, though Silent Noon is by far the masterpiece.

A E Housman verses inspired Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge (1909), and also Along the Field (1925-7). These songs, set for high voice and solo violin (Mary Bevan and Jack Liebeck) are exquisite studies in minor key modality, so refined that they seem to hover in  mystical trance.  In "We'll to the Woods No More", the vocal line stretches, with seemingly little dynamic variation,  mirrored by the violin.  But perhaps that is the point : the mood is so elusive that the song floats away, like a ghost.  "Along the Field" develops the mystery. The plaintive vocal line suggests  plainchant, or possibly vespers, for the lovers will soon be parted by death. The leaves of the aspen tree know what lies ahead but cannot  speak. "And I spell nothing in their stir" sings Bevan with hushed deliberation. Even the relatively cheerful "In the Morning" is melancholy, and "The Sigh that Heaves the Grasses" drips with portent.  The violin part in "Good-Bye" is subtly discordant, picking up on the unspoken emotions of the lad so abruptly dismissed by the object of his affections.  The text of "Fancy's Knell" resembles "Clun" from On Wenlock Edge, though the wordier scansion of this poem doesn't invite quite such a strong setting. The set ends with "With Rue my Heart is Laden", also set by George Butterworth, Vaughan Williams' version even more aphoristic and enigmatic. Although these songs are usually heard with tenor, the silvery timbre of Bevan's voice, in my opinion, enhances their strange, surreal magic. This perfomance is so beautiful that it makes this recording an absolute must.

Two settings of A Cradle Song to a text by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one by Vaughan Williams from 1905, the other By Holst from his Op.16 H6 (1903-5) contrast with Vaughan Williams' Blake's Cradle Song (1928) , the composer responding to the greater complexity of Blake's poem. Holst's Four Songs Op.14, H14 (1896-98)  are fairly early works, setting poems by Charles Kingsley, Henrik Ibsen and Heinrich Heine (both in English translation) and Robert Bridges.

Vaughan Williams' Bushes and Briars (1908), introduces the group of folk songs in this collection. Bushes and Briars is seminally important, since it was the first song the composer collected in the field, having heard it sung by a labourer in Essex in 1903. It's been performed hundreds of times in many forms, including by modern urban "folk", but here Roderick Williams brings out the sophistication of Vaughan Williams' transcription. The first verse is unaccompanied, as traditional ballad usually was, but the piano part develops it as art song, warmed by the natural sincerity of Williams' style. A memorable performance.  Vaughan Williams collected The Lark in the Morning (1908) in Essex, expurgating more ribald aspects of the original.  The Captain's Apprentice (1908) from a fishing community in Kings Lynn, was adapted into the Norfolk Rhapsody, on which the composer was working at that period.

Holst made sixteen arrangements of folk songs, two of which we have here, The Willow Tree (H83/6 1906-8), and Abroad as I was walking (H83/1). Holst's Four Songs for Voice and Violin (Op. 35,  H132, 1916-17)  display a more "modern" sensibility. There are no time signatures."Bar lines are used for coordination purposes, but the length of each bar varies freely according to the melodic line", as stated in the uncredited programme notes.  Two settings of Walt Whitman's texts from Whispers of Heavenly Death form the basis of the songs Darest Thou Now O Soul. Holst's version H72, 1904-5) is declamatory, delivered here with dramatic flair by Roderick Williams.  Vaughan Williams' version, which he was working on at the same period, incorporating the text into A Sea Symphony. Here it is heard in a setting for solo voice and piano, from 1925. The unison version for voices and string orchestra - a hymn with chamber orchestra - can be heard on Martyn Brabbins' recent recording of A Sea Symphony. (Please read more about that here).

Vaughan Williams : The Song of Love, Albion, Roderick Williams, Kitty Whately

From Albion, The Song of Love featuring songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with Kitty Whately, Roderick Williams and pianist William Vann.  Albion is unique, treasured by Vaughan Williams devotees for rarely heard repertoire from the composer's vast output, so don't expect mass market commerical product.  Albion recordings often highlight new perspectives. This  release includes the famous The House of Life, with Kitty Whately, a mezzo-soprano, and songs in German and French, with Roderick Williams, probably the pre-eminent interpreter of English song.

Though the full cycle of The House of Life is now nearly always heard with male voice, even with bass-baritones, the premiere was given at the Wigmore Hall on 2nd December 1904, in the presence of Vaughan Williams himself, with Edith Clegg, a contralto, accompanied by Hamilton Harty. Some of the songs, to sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,  have texts that suggest a man addressing a woman, such as Love's Minstrels and Heart's Haven, but the others four are gender-neutral. Indeed, Silent Noon, one of the best loved of all Vaughan Williams' songs, lends itself particularly well to the female voice. The warmth in Whately's timbre enhances the image of high summer langour, where "hands lie open in the long fresh grass", the piano gently palpitating.  Whately breathes tenderness into the phrase "All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, are golden kingcups fields with silver edge"  One can almost feel the vista, and endless horizons.  But the "visible silence, still as the hourglass" cannot last. "Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly hangs ......" Dragonflies die, their splendour brief and doomed. Whately's voice seems to hover, making the passionate final declartion ever more poignant. "O! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower". The final phrase "the song of love" (hence the album title) can be a little too high for some male voices, but poses no problems for a mezzo-soprano. Though the cycle is The House of Life, the texts deal with Death, often as a strange visitor, as in Death-in-Life, but the overall impact, given the understatement of Vaughan Williams' settings, suggests that happiness, and life, must be cherished while it lasts.

In the Three Old German Songs (1902) Vaughan Williams explored medieval German song, capturing an archaic nature rather different from folk song, German or English.  The setting of To Daffodils on this set comes from a manuscript found at Gunby Hall, which the composer visited regularly. This differs from the 1895 setting of Robert Herrick's poem in that the short lines ebb and flow from quietness to climax, much like Vaughan Williams' Orpheus and His Lute (1903),.  In the Four French Songs, from 1903-4, Vaughan Williams sets medieval French song, Quant li Louseignolz, for example rather than "Quand le Rossignol", a song with connections to knights who took part in the Crusades. Thus the studied "medieval" formality. Roderick Williams has no peer in English song, though his French is less idiomatic, but he's a natural communicator. Here, his delivery brings out the special qualities in these songs, with their stylized formality, very different from folk song and indeed from later French song. There may well be a connection between these songs and Love's Minstrels in The House of Life, with its "modern" take on medievalism.

With Buonaparty (1908) Roderick Willliams is back on home ground, his delivery animated, crackling with character. This is one of Vaughan Williams’ only two settings of Thomas Hardy's poems though, as we know from his Symphony no 9, he knew Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles and the evocations of Wiltshire and Wessex.  Perhaps the composer didn't warm to Hardy's other values. Gerald Finzi, who did understand Hardy's irony and lack of deference, set more Hardy than anyone else. Finzi's setting of Hardy's Rollicum-Rorum quite explicitly satirizes populist war mongering.  Roderick Williams' Finzi settings of Hardy are essential listening, not only for the dynamism of his performances, but for what he reveals of Finzi's feel for Hardy as iconoclast.  RVW's Buonaparty was intended though not used for Hugh the Drover. It's robust, with a jolly refrain, but not specially perceptive.

With The Willow Song (1897), followed by Three Songs from Shakespeare (1925), Kitty Whately sings some of Vaughan Williams’ settings of Shakespeare. This version of Orpheus and His Lute is  almost neo-classical, its refinement more subtle than the better known earlier version.  With The Spanish Ladies (1912) and The Turtle Dove (1919-1934), Roderick Williams returns to classic Vaughan Williams, the first based on a sea shanty, the second on an old ballad collected by the composer from a traditional singer's performance at the Plough Inn, in Sussex in 1904 . These set the context for Two poems by Seumas O'Sullivan,The Twilight People (1905) and A Piper (1908)  published in 1925, when the composer was working on Riders to the Sea. O'Sullivan was the pen name of James Sullivan Starkey, a Dublin journalist. The plaintive lines may reflect Vaughan Williams' knowledge of Ireland, through the prism of W B Yeats and J M Synge.  Whately and Williams conclude with two duets based on German folk songs, in English translation, Think of me and Adieu.  Though Albion recordings cater to a very specialized market, this set is very well planned and performed : a good introduction for those wanting to delve deeper into Ralph Vaughan Williams and the sources of his inspiration.