Requiem : The Pity of War - Bostridge Pappano

"Requiem: the Pity of War with Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano.  The inspiration came from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which Bostridge has done numerous times. Britten's War Requiem," he writes "seems to express in art Winston Churchill's notion of the 1914-18 conflict as the initiator of the 20th century's own Thirty Years War" since it spans the First and Second World Wars, blending the poetry of Wilfred Owen, poet of the trenches and the spirit of reconciliation that motivated the commission marking the  rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. Thus the quotation from Owen, "My subject is War, and the Pity of War". "How might one reflect the experience and significance of the conflict" writes Bostridge "in a song recital ?". The answer might be this excellent programme, with interesting repertoire choices and approaches to more familiar material. Bostridge and Pappano, whose partnership is long and fruiful, are doing this recital live at the Barbican Hall on December 5th. The recording, from Warner Classics, is now available, well produced with good illustrations.

Bostridge and Pappano begin with George Butterworth's Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, perhaps th best known English song cycle with a connection to war, given that Butterworth  was killed in the Somme in August 1916.  Housman's poems were published in 1896 : the war they pertain to might  be the Boer War, or colonial wars, but the connotations are not specifically military. They deal with more generalized concepts of youth and death, impermanence and loss.  Even though Butterworth collected folk song, a quasi-folk song approach doesn't necessarily apply.  Bostridge and Pappano demonstrate an art song approach, which may at first seem unsettling, but works on a more esoteric level  In "When I was One and Twenty" the last words "'tis true, 'tis true" are held open ended, suggesting possibilities beyond text. If the dynamic lines in "Look not into mine Eyes" are more extreme than usual, this emphasizes the unease that lies behind the poem : the lad "that many loved in vain" does not reveal himself, to anyone. "A Jonquil, not a Grecian Lad". "Is my team ploughing" feels decidedly supernatural.

This disc is worth getting, though for a superlative performance of Rudi Stephan’s song cycle Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied. Stephan was an extremely promising composer as his best-known works, the two Musik für Orkester in einem Satz attest, his opera Der ersten Mensch being a prototype of Expressionist music theatre.  The six songs in this cycle, to poems by Gerda von Robertus (1873-1939) inhabit a world much closer to aesthetics of the period when exoticism was heightened  by an awareness of the dangers of the subconcious.  The poems are terse aphorisms, Stephan's settings concise. The nearest equivalent might be Alban Berg's Altenberg-Lieder, also from the same period (1911-12) In "Kythera", "Der Rosen Düfte liebeatmend schwingen in welchen Weilen" while the sound of aoelian harps drifts from afar. The setting floats gently, held sotto voce.  In "Pantherlied" the piano line ripples, suggesting pent-up animal energy.  The text in "Abendfrieden" is little more than a series of broken phrases which Stephan uses to create a song so delicate that it seems to hover in stillness. This oscillation occurs also in individual words like "Sonnenfeuer" which need careful shaping, but Bostridge captures the right vulnerabilty.  "In Nachbars Garten duftet" describes a linden tree, which shivers "dammerlauschig kühl". Yet this is no pastoral. Lovers embrace, but why do the poet's eyes "overflow in burning pain"?  The song is as magical as a song by Hugo Wolf, but with a kick in the tail.  The mood of secrecy continues in "Glück zu Zweien" where "in the hubbub of the crowd, we found the silence of shared feeling".  The vocal line stretches and curls, twining like "Zwei Könige wir, die finden das Reich ihrer Einsamkeiten". Throughout this cycle, tension has been building up, which finds release in the final song "Das Hohelied der Nacht". Yet again Stephan observes the fragmented nature of the phrases,  using them to proceed rapidly to the last line "Du küsst es mir vom Munde", which rises like a cry of sudden triumph.  These songs are miniature masterpieces and are done reasonably often, but Bostridge brings out the inner musical logic better than anyone else, with his intuitive feel for meaning and the curling, curving timbre of his voice.  Incidentally,  Stephan died in strange circumstances. The night before he died, he could not sleep, surrounded by the agonized cries of the wounded all around.  In the early hours of the morning, he stood upright in his trench at Tarnopol in Galicia on the Eastern Front, and shouted  "Ich halte es nicht aus!" and was promptly shot by a sniper.  He was barely 28.  

From the sophistication of Rudi Stephan to the relative straightforwardness of Kurt Weill's Four Walt Whitman Songs.  Bostridge varies the marching rhythms in "Beat ! Beat ! The Drums" with articulation that twists in protest. If  "Captain ! My captain !" is a strophic ballad, "Come up from the Fields, my Father, there's a letter" is dramatic, delivered here with appropriate portent.  The military antecedents of "The Dirge for Two Veterans" are impeccable. Gustav Holst set this text ("The Last Sunbeam") in 1914, and it was also set by Vaughan Williams (in Dona Nobis Pacem).  Weill wrote these songs after Pearl Harbor, when the United States joined the Second World War.  Like Britten's War Requiem, they help this Bostridge and Pappano programme bridge two World Wars.   
Three songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn conclude the programme. Again, these are not folk songs, but art songs.  Significantly, the songs chosen here are ghost songs, which suit a singer who is a superlative Peter Quint. In "Revelge", skeletons march through a town at night, and "Der Tambourg'sell" is a death knell, Pappano's piano "drumming" as Bostridge's voice rises to near-scream before descending to the low rumble of the refrain "Gute Nacht".  Best of all, though, is "Wo die Schöne Trompeten blasen" where Bostridge and Pappano capture the spookiness that pervades the song even before the girl knows what's going on. She, too, will die before the year is over.

Celebrating English Song Roderick Williams SOMM

"Celebrating English Song" new from SOMM recordings with Roderick Williams, with Susie Allan, pianist.   George Butterworth's Six Song from a Shropshire lad, Gerald Finzi's Let us Garlands Bring and songs by John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, Warlock, Moeran, Quilter and Benjamin Britten.

Roderick Williams transformed English song with his gift for natural, direct communication.   He's one of the finest champions of the genre, ever.  Yet his legacy hasn't been preserved on recording at the level that it should be. It's scattered over many different labels, with varying production standards.  Often, the more specialized the repertoire, the finer the standards.. So thanks to SOMM for this recording, a fine sampler, pitched for listeners new to the genre, as suggested by the rather basic liner notes. Some choices, however, are more esoteric and ought to be flagged up for more attention

Butterworth's Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad is basic repertoire, which Williams has performed many times. His recording from 2010 with Ian Burnside is one which most fans of English song will already have in their collections.  Gerald Finzi's Let us Garlands Bring is another Williams staple, which he first recorded some twelve years ago.  It's good, though, to have recent performances in high-quality sound. The four songs by John Ireland, Great Things, In Boyhood, Youth's Spring Tribute and the iconic Sea Fever, also appeared on Williams’s recording from 2008, and the Vaughan Williams songs, Silent Noon and The Vagabond, also have earlier incarnations. Nontheless, it is good to hear recent performances, in good sound quality. As Williams's voice matures, it hasn't lost its unaffected freshness. In every new performance, the music lives, afresh.

Williams has long been associated with Ian Venables, so the two Venables songs, A Kiss and Flying Crooked, are a very welcome inclusion in this set.  A Kiss, from 1992, when Venables was in his 30's, is a setting of a Poem by Thomas Hardy that shows the influence of Gerald Finzi in its fidelity to text. Finzi set more Hardy poems than most, and Venables was closely involved in Finzi circles. Flying Crooked, to a poem by Robert Graves, is altogether more individual. It's a model of concise expressiveness.  In just over one minute, Venables replicates the "honest idiocy of flight" that is the movement of  a butterfly that "lurches here and here by guess/and god and hope and hopelessness".  Like the butterfly, the music doesn't fly straight but flips about capriciously. A wonderful sense of  freedom in the dancing notes in the piano part, executed with great delicacy by Susie Allan. The vocal part's a challenge, too. Williams’s voice soars and flutters playfully on the word "aerobatic".  Wonderfully cheeky, and refreshing. This recording should have new listeners rushing for Williams's recording of Venable's The Song of the Severn, or indeed Williams's Severn & Somme collection (also with Susie Allan) for SOMM in 2006, so good that it's still a classic.   

That's why this SOMM release is so worthwhile. It connects the mainstream of English song to modern development.  Benjamin Britten's The Salley Gardens is a variant of a very old song indeed, as is The Ploughboy, but listen to how wittily Britten incorporates Schubert into the song.   The  rhythms suggest the ploughboy's physical energy but also hint at the manic nature of the lad's ambition.  Ploughboy, politician and crook !  Allan's top notes fly as the pedal pounds bumptiously.  The song also demonstrates how Williams can inject personality into his singing. As he sings "Whatever's good for me, sir, I never will oppose", his voice darkens.  For a brief moment the ploughboy is revealing his true, venal self, behind the mock-merry cheekiness.  In a similar vein, Peter Warlock's miniature, Jilian of Berry, where jolly melody hides deceit. The barmaid is generous, but her customers are cheats. Given Warlock's own propensity for drink and mischief , the song has deeper levels.

Three Ivor Gurney songs here, Black Stitchel, Lights Out and Captain Stratton's Fancy. illustrate a side of Ivor Gurney that has somewhat been obscured by the emphasis on his service in the war and its aftermath.   Edward Thomas's mud-stained manuscript for his poem Light's Out lies in the Imperial War Museum, since Thomas was killed at Arras a hundred years ago, but both poem and song are about much more than war.   "I have come to the borders of sleep, .....where all must lose their way, however straight....." Thomas’s syntax curls  past the lines as they lie on the page, tracing a wayward path which Gurney follows, with great sensitivity.  Something is coming to an end. Thus the minor key. and long, curving lines which Williams defines beautifully.  But where does the future, lie, if it exists? Gurney builds brief pauses after each phrase.  "To go into the unknown, ....I must enter...and leave...alone". The song ends, hovering, without resolution.   In contrast, Captain Stratton's Fancy, which connects to the vigorously upbeat mood of Sea Fever (both texts by John Masefield)  to The Vagabond and indeed to the boisterous Jilian of Berry.  The piano part marches, while Williams sings with mock heroism. "like an old bold mate of Henry Morgan".  Dutch courage?  Another song which displays Williams’s ability to be at once funny and profound. 

George Butterworth 100 years ago today

One hundred years ago today, George Butterworth was still alive. On 5th August 1916, his body lay dead on a battlefield in the Somme.  He was leading a party of men on a sortie up Munster Alley, when  shortly before 4.45 am on 5th August 1915, he was shot in the head. The best authority on Butterworth remains Michael Barlow's biography "Whom the Gods Love" and this is the one to get. Barlow's book is an invaluable source, much of it  drawn from family letters (now in Oxford)  and material at Cecil Sharp House. Curiously, though, there's little in his book on Butterworth's war record, since he relied on papers collected by Butterworth's father.  So 15 years ago, I went to the War Office archive thinking his details would be easy to trace. Then  I hit a brick wall. No Lt. Butterworth! No wonder Barlow was stymied

Next step, then, was to go to the list of medals, which are meticulously documented.  There, I found that Butterworth had enlisted as "Kaye Butterworth!"   He'd only been awarded one Military Cross, not three, but that's still an important achievement since MC's are not handed out except in exceptional cases.  Although I didn't have time to access the main regimental records, which aren't in London, I did find the original War Diary of Butterworth's Regiment. War diaries are moment to moment records of what was happening in battle, written down verbatim as the action was happening.  They're sent to higher command behind lines so the generals can follow what's happening on the front line, while action is still in progress. In 1914-18 field communications weren't what they'd be today. Sometimes these diaries are written on scraps, sometimes in pencil and sometimes they're stained with mud and darker substances.  And here is what I found :

2.53 sent following message to Lt Butterworth at B Company "Send a strong bombing platoon up Munster Alley to hold and block". Note owing to our artillery shelling our front line Lt Butterworth cannot have received this message until after 3.45 am

3.40 received from Lt Clarke "we must have reinforcements at once...the men I have got are being kept there by revolvers". 3.41 gave Lt Batty message for Lt Butterworth to reinforce Munster Alley with one platoon at once.

4.19 Forward observation reported that our party at Munster Alley was being heavily bombed but we were apparently holding our own. 4.43 (Brigadier sent 25 men from another unit to relieve)

4.45 Lt Butterworth killed.

Casualties 5th August : Lt G S Kaye-Butterworth, Lt N A Target killed, 2nd Lt Rees
and Batty wounded. Other ranks : 4 killed. 18 wounded, 3 shell shock, 5 missing. 

(Note: the unfortunately named Lt Target featured in the Diary many times. He seems tto have been a charismatic fellow who had been awarded a Military Cross in June. He was much admired by the Brigadier and the man who wrote the diaries. Butterworth would have known him too.)

Plenty on Butterworth on this site, please explore.  Including

Complete Butterworth Song Book (Mark Stone)

A Jonquil not a Grecian Lad - Butterworth Songs (Roderick Willliams)  

The  photo at the top shows the officers of the 13th Durham Light Infantry  The man circled is supposed to be Butterworth.It's possible since we know the Kinora films and Morris dancing stills that Butterworth was short and self effacing. Below, Butterworth second from left, in 1912.

Aldeburgh Knussen Berg Butterworth Bray

Aldeburgh and Oliver Knussen, so closely connected that it's always an occasion when Ollie conducts the BBC SO at Snape. Ostensibly, the theme of this programme commemorated the First World War, but frankly it didn't need an artificial angle. In true Britten, Aldeburgh and Knussen tradition, this concert was forward looking and adventurous, working very well on its own musical terms.

Britten and Aldeburgh have always been outside the mainstream of British tradition, so Elgar isn't heard much here, and the oratorios and major works don't suit the Maltings.  Bach, however, is an Aldeburgh staple, since Britten passionately believed in links between the baroque and the modern.  So for a change, Elgar's transcriptions of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C minor.  Bach often gets tellingly transcribed in every era,  so transcriptions offer a glimpse into the transcriber's style.  Elgar's Bach is stately,  an ocean liner rather than a doughty skiff. Not top-notch Elgar but pleasant enough. It served, however, to magnify the originality of George Butterworth to whom Ralph Vaughan Williams dedicated his Second Symphony, an acknowledgement that, without Butterworth's vision, RVW might not have achieved so much so soon. Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad is based on the same Housman sources that inspired both Butterworth and RVW's wonderful song cycles. RVW orchestrated his songs, but Butterworth created something entirely new for his orchestral Shropshire Lad.   You can recognize echoes of the songs, but the whole is a quasi-symphonic work in its own terms, sophisticated ideas expressed with clarity and originality.  Because Knussen doesn't do mainstream "English" music, he approached Butterworth without baggage. This Shropshire Lad sounded remarkably fresh. Definitely not "cowpat school", but a contender for inclusion in the new age of music that was fast developing all over Europe at the time the piece was written.  What might British music have been had Butterworth survived the war?

With this imaginative Butterwoth still resonating in the mind, Gary Carpenter's Willie Stock didn't have much chance. Even on relistening to the broadcast, it's a work that is wonderful in concept, though less so in execution. Willie Stock was an ordinary soldier, killed in the trenches, so Carpenter adapts popular song of the time, deconstructing and fragmenting the tunes, just as the men in the trenches were blown to bits.   It's  thoughtful, and one feels close to poor Willie Stock but it might be best heard as part of a documentary, rather than a concert piece.

Elliott Carter's Sound Fields replaced at short notice a Carter work for baritone and orchestra. Sound Fields was born when Knussen and Carter were having lunch together at Tanglewood in 2007.  Since Carter wrote so well for string quartet, it’s surprising that this is his first work for string orchestra. Yet, despite the larger numbers involved, it’s diaphanous, a gently wavering sequence of chords. A single chord is played by twelve sub-groups in the orchestra, achieving  startling density by simple, elegant means. Sound Fields is slow and smooth, the chords gradually enfolding out of each other. It starts with slow timbred cello, evolving towards a simpler, barely audible final chord, also cello, that seems to evaporate into nothingness. All in barely four minutes.

Charlotte Bray is an Aldeburgh regular, and good, so her Stone Dancer was eagerly anticipated. It was inspired by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Red Stone Dancer  (1913-14)  when western art was learning from non-western "primitive" art. Picasso, Braque, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and more. Thus the figure of a dancer, whose métier is fluid movement, depicted as solid, inanimate object. What comes over, though, is physical presence and strength.  Thus Charlotte Bray's Stone Dancer moves in a series of smaller movements, each held long enough that we feel the force behind the ideas before moving on.  This reminded me a lot of Rebecca Saunders's  monumental sculptures in sound, which come vividly to life in performance.  British music is most certainly alive and well, without a whisper of twee.

And so to Alban Berg's Three Piece for Orchestra Op 6 from the same period as Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture.  Again, the idea of dance and physical forces expressed through music.   In the first "piece", the Praeludium, the orchestra growls, as if invoking primitive powers. The central piece is even called Reigen referring to dance.  Ländler and waltzes appear fleetingly, caught up in the swirl of the larger flow, as if the orchestra was like time itself, pulling things along in its wake.  Thus the wild finale, where dance figures coarsen into march: the idea of movement made brutal   Knussen and the BBCSO defined the sparkling touches in the piece so well that the contrasts with low winds, wailing brass and timpani felt savagely disconcerting.

Oramo BBCSO Butterworth Anna Clyne Elgar

Sakari  Oramo's Elgar credentials are beyond reproach. With the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, he led the Elgar 150th birthday celebrations, culminating in a stunning series of all three symphonies. He didn't win the Elgar Medal - even before Andrew Davis - for nothing. It was a pleasure to hear him conduct Elgar at the Barbican London this week  with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Oramo's traverse of Elgar's Symphony no 2 in E flat major (Op 63) was magisterial, emphasizing the broad sweep of ideas within.  Elgar referred to the piece as "a passionate journey of the soul". With magnificent assurance, Oramo created the motif that suggests the "Spirit of Delight" in the famous quote from Shelley. For a moment it seemed that this glorious serenity might never end, yet disturbing murmurs arose from the brass. What then do we make of the tension that built up with the bristling jagged rhythms?  Early audiences didn't know what to make of this most personal, and most enigmatic, of pieces.  It also heralds the long years ahead when Elgar wrote relatively little. 
Ostensibly,  Elgar was mourning the death of Edward VII. It would be too much to expect that he might, in 1910/11, have intuited the passing of an era. But modern audiences, with hindsight, cannot help but ponder. 

Whatever that "Spirit of Delight" might be, Elgar's elusive second symphony is  mediation on impermanance, especially in the context of the rest of this programme, which began with George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody. This, too, was written in 1911, when the confidence seemed beyond  challenge.  The  Industrial Revolution started in Britain. A prosperous and urbanized nation ruled the world - literally - through gunboats and trade. British writers like Wordsworth led the romantic revolution in Literature. Yet, while Germans had been exploring folk culture for a hundred years, British composer and intellectuals were just beginning to seek out forgotten oral tradition.  Georgina Boyes's book The Imagined Village (1993) explodes a few myths  about this period, and is essential reading.  Perhaps A E Housman's poems, and the novels of Thomas Hardy, reopened the long-lost mines of nostalgia. 

Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad Fantasy is based on Housman's poem When I was one and twenty, which Butterworth also wrote as a song for voice and piano, as did his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams.  The poem is pristine. Blossoming trees "wear white for Easter tide". But petals fall, and youth grows old. "No use to talk to me".  Oramo and the BBCSO performed it with grace,  capturing the mood of transient magic. There's no room for maudlin sentiment. Butterworth didn't know he was going to be dead in five  years. And, as Housman reminds us, Spring returns every year, whether or not we're there to witness it.  In any6 case, there['s a twist of humour in the piece. The protagonist isn't an old man. He's still only 22  Oramo's approach blended beauty with dignity, far closer to the spirit of the poem, and to Butterworth's music.

That Oramo and the BBCSO do Elgar and Butterworth well is a given. The revelation, on this occasion, was Anna Clyne's The Seamstress, receiving its UK premiere. It's based on a poem by W B Yeats, which tells of a seamstress who embroiders a coat with many colours and images, only to have it stolen. Clyne, British born but resident in the US, adapts the sounds of Irish fiddle playing, creating a keening, other-worldly palette that evokes the past yet is surreal enough to be entirely of the present.  The Seamstress unfolds in five parts, which Clyne calls "ballets" reinforcing the idea of movement and constant change.  The coat is lost, perthaps stolen, but its memory, and the creative urge behind it, remain unsullied. Clyne's The Seamstress is an exceptionally beautiful piece, worth listening to over and over on repeat broadcast.  Jennifer Koh's playing was sensuous and very expressive. An  utterly fascinating piece and performance, perfectly attuned to the emotional spirit of Elgar 2 and Butterworth.
 

Enigma : Cecil Coles, Martyn Brabbins BBC SSO

Three premieres of sorts of works by composers who have been dead for a hundred years?  Intriguing. Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in  George Butterworth's Orchestral Fantasia and Cecil Coles Behind the Lines and Sorrowful Dance (broadcast available on BBC Radio 3 here).

The anniversary of the First World War generates interest in composers of the period.  British war poets like Wilfred Owen,  Siegfried Sassoon,  Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg  and Rupert Brooke are justly celebrated, even part of the basic school curriculum. But what of British composers of the period?  Ralph Vaughan Williams, being rather older the "Lost Generation",  survived but many others didn't. How might British music have developed  if Butterworth, Gurney, W Denis Browne (read more here) and others even more forgotten, had lived to fulfil their potential?  Understandably we'ree intrigued.

Gurney at least left enough material that some of his music can be reasonably reconstructed. Gurney's War Elegy, for example, is a  significant work that deserves a place in the mainstream repertoire.  Read about the Proms premiere of Gurney's War Elegy HERE and the background behind it HERE.  

Gurney reconstructions are largely built on the composer's original material.  Not so, though, some of the other reconstructions around.  Butterworth's Orchestral Fantasia exists as a 92-bar fragment. A short score may exist, but all that is currently known is a rough manuscript with crossings out and amendments.   Michael Barlow, in his seminal biography of the composer Whom the Gods Love suggests that Butterworth might, in 1914, have been on the cusp of a change in style "with not a few influences from European composers".  Vaughan Williams's music was utterly transformed by his contact with Ravel, and indeed to some extent by Butterworth himself, who spurred RVW to write his Symphony no 2 "London".

Barlow mentions that, while Butterworth was an undergraduate at Oxford a don remarked: "There goes more Red Revolution than in all Russia"   Butterworth is a mystery. Why did he burn his unpublished music? Why did he so cherish the male bonding camaraderie of the trenches? Why did he die the way he did, by throwing himself into the line of fire?  We shall never know.  Barlow also describes the fragment of the Orchestral Fantasia thus  "A hushed, dark-coloured opening, on bassoons and divided violas and cellos, leads to an andantino section in which one basic theme, first heard on oboe and violas, is developed, but the score is too fragmentary for constructive comment. A vivace section of only a few bars includes a promising figure on trumpets, but there the music stops".  

Since there is so little to go on, any "completion" can be little more than conjecture. Kriss Russman's version extends the basic core, described by Barlow above, with references to other music by Butterworth, rather more a suite than what Butterworth might have written. Since there isn't all that much true Butterworth around, we recognize fragments and start to think of those other works, (much of it piano song)  rather than the fragment itself. Like the orchestration of A Shropshire Lad heard at last year's Proms, without much point, though enjoyable enough.

Cecil Coles  (1888-1918) , was three years younger than Butterworth, yet already more European in focus. He had lived in Germany, where he was assistant conductor at Stuttgart Opera. This threw him right into the fertile creative ferment of those times, not only in music but in literature, art, theatre  and film.  He knew Richard Strauss and must have heard Elektra.  Perhaps he even knew of Rudi Stephan (1887-1915), whose orchestral music is truly innovative, and whose opera Die ersten Menschen would shock audiences when it was finally premiered after Stephan was killed on the Eastern Front. 
What might have become of Coles had he survived? The question is even more intriguing than for Butterworth, for Coles's music is  so distinctive and so individual that it doesn'tb really  fit  into conventional British music stereotypes. This may account for why he was largely forgotten until Martyn Brabbins recorded Coles's music for Hyperion in 2002.  Both Before the Lines and Sorrowful Dance appear on this CD. It's significant that Coles's other great admirer was Gustav Holst.

Coles's Behind the Lines  was written in four movements of which only the first and last survive, Estaminet du Carrefour and Cortège. The second and third movements were titled The Wayside Shrine and Rumours, which may give some indication of the scale of its construction.  So much is made of the role of folksong in British music that it's refreshing to hear how Coles adapts the vibrant sounds of a French drinking establishment into the first movement. It's vibrant with a pungent Gallic twist, sensual and uninhibited, Coles must have known the music of Ravel and Debussy: this is far from genteel pastoralism even when that pastoralism describes earthy peasants.  Coles  defines the harmonic line firmly, which takes off with athletic energy.  These are reels, fast dances which swirl round capriciously. It feels almost dangerously wild.  With a flourish, a more assured line emerges, taken up by the brass, which gives even firmer definition to a wall of sound, cymbals riding on its crest .  Cortège. too, is more than a straightforward funeral march.  No maudlin sentimentality here.  Behind the Lines deals with the experience of war, but it's clear sighted and strong,  even quite gracious. 

Coles began Sorrowful Dance for his wife, while on R&R in Southampton. It is a dance, moving with thoughtful deliberation.  It's melancholy yet positive, since a brighter theme  emerges, again firmly defined. Perhaps Coles's wife could take comfort. The circular dance theme returns, as gentle as an embrace.  

And so Brabbins and the BBC SSO ended their Glasgow concert with Elgar Enigma Variations. What do we really know about what went into these 13 vignettes? We can guess but can never be sure. An appropriate end to a concert that featured What Might Have Been.

George Butterworth 100 years ago today

One hundred years ago today, George Butterworth was still alive. On 5th August 1916, his body lay dead on a battlefield in the Somme.  He was leading a party of men on a sortie up Munster Alley, when  shortly before 4.45 am on 5th August 1915, he was shot in the head. The best authority on Butterworth remains Michael Barlow's biography "Whom the Gods Love". This an invaluable source, much of it  drawn from family letters (now in Oxford)  and material at Cecil Sharp House. Curiously, though, there's little in his book on Butterworth's war record, since her relied on papers collected by Butterworth's father.  Since  nearly everything about officers in the 1914-1918 War was documented, I went to the War Office records thinking his details would be easy to trace. Then  I hit a brick wall. No Lt. Butterworth! No wonder Barlow was stymied

Next step, then, was to go to the list of medals which are carefully documented.  There, I dound that Butterworth had enlisted as "Kaye Butterworth!"   He'd only been awarded one Military Cross, not three, but that's still an important achievement since MC's are not handed out except in exceptional cases.  Although I didn't access the main regimental records, which aren't in London, I did find the original War Diary of Butterworth's Regiment, which is a moment to moment record of what was happening in battle, written down verbatim as the action was happening. War Diaries are primary material. They're sent to higher command behind lines so the generals can follow what's happening on the front line. Sometimes these diaries are written on scraps, sometimes in pencil and sometimes they're stained with mud and darker substances.  And here is what I found :

2.53 sent following message to Lt Butterworth at B Company "Send a strong bombing platoon up Munster Alley to hold and block". Note owing to our artillery shelling our front line Lt Butterworth cannot have received this message until after 3.45 am

3.40 received from Lt Clarke "we must have reinforcements at once...the men I have got are being kept there by revolvers". 3.41 gave Lt Batty message for Lt Butterworth to reinforce Munster Alley with one platoon at once.

4.19 Forward observation reported that our party at Munster Alley was being heavily bombed but we were apparently holding our own. 4.43 (Brigadier sent 25 men from another unit to relieve)

4.45 Lt Butterworth killed.

Casualties 5th August : Lt G S Kaye-Butterworth, Lt N A Target killed, 2nd Lt Rees
and Batty wounded. Other ranks : 4 killed. 18 wounded, 3 shell shock, 5 missing. 

(Note: the unfortunately named Lt Target featured in the Diary many times. He seems tto have been a charismatic fellow who had been awarded a Military Cross in June. He was much admired by the Brigadier and the man who wrote the diaries. Butterworth would have known him too.)

Plenty on Butterworth on this site, please explore.  Including

Complete Butterworth Song Book (Mark Stone)

A Jonquil not a Grecian Lad - Butterworth Songs (Roderick Willliams)  

The  photo at the top shows the officers of the 13th Durham Light Infantry  The man circled is supposed to be Butterworth.It's possible since we know the Kinora films and Morris dancings stills that Butterworth was short and self effacing. Below, Butterworth second from left, in 1912.

Flowers of the Field - Gurney Finzi Butterworth RVW

"As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes", so goes Psalm 103. This new recording, Flowers of the Field  connects composers affected by the 1914-1918 war, but it's real significance lies in its featuring the world premiere recording of Ivor Gurney's The Trumpet and of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera. 

Ivor Gurney was gassed at Passchendaele, and spent the last 20 years of his life in and out of mental  hospitals. The Trumpet was written in 1921 but remained unpublished and unperformed until 2007. Here we hear the edition reconstructed by Gurney scholar Philip Lancaster with full orchestration, which received its Three Choirs Festival premiere in 2010, which I was privileged to attend.  Read Philip Lancaster on the genesis of the piece HERE.  Gurney used a poem by Edward Thomas, killed in Arras in 1917, whose work he had set previously. The song begins with a resolute "Rise up! Rise up!", the City of London choir singing as one voice with forceful attack. It's a curious poem. Does the trumpet  refer to the trumpet of modern battle or to the trumpet that marks the beginning of the End of Time in the book of Revelation? Gurney emphasizes the word "Scatters" in the phrase "as the trumpet blowing scatters the dreams of Man".  Unlit stars, dew and the traces of lovers must be scattered in this strange new dawn. Percussion pounds, and the full orchestra surges. The choir cries out, unequivocally "Scatter it, Scatter it!". The clarity of the setting reflects the image of  "that clear horn"  and "the air that has washed  the eyes of the stars". No maudlin sentimentality here, but clear-sighted fervour. "Arise! Arise!" the choir sings. After Armageddon, the past will be erased, the dead will rise from their graves in a new era of hope.

Strictly speaking, the premiere recording of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera was conducted by Richard Hickox nearly ten years ago, but in a different  performing edition by Philip Thomas, made in 1990. This version is edited and completed by Christian Alexander. Hilary Davan Wetton conducts the London Mozart Players with idiomatic depth.  The Reqiuem de Camera (1924) is an ambitious piece in  four sections. An orchestral prelude leads to an extended choral setting of a poem by John Masefield  "How still this quiet cornfield is tonight". The text doesn't explicitly mention context, but the original poem was titled August 1914. Although this is very early Finzi, we can already hear how he would go on to be influenced by images of English landscape and history, and the passage of time.  Wetton, who has conducted a great deal of English choral music, gets the City of London Choir to sing with nicely hushed tones: silence is of the essence.  The same mood of timelessness prevails in the section for baritone (Roderick Williams) and orchestra: "Only a man harrowing clods".  Finzi dedicated the work to Ernest Farrar, his tutor, who was killed on the Somme in 1918, but I think it's a mistake to overstate the idea that the Requiem connects musically to Butterworth or to Gurney (whom Finzi championed). It is far more relevant to assess its relevance to Finzi's own later work, and to his songs and choral pieces. It's not as sophisticated as Intimations of Immortality, but contains, in germ, the spirit of Finzi's future greatness.

On this disc we can hear Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad – Rhapsody for Orchestra and, more of a rarity, the complete Ralph Vaughan Williams An Oxford Elegy, with Jeremy Irons as narrator. The Oxford Elegy is based on a poem by Matthew Arnold about a scholar who runs away to learn from gypsies.  He could be any man who disdains academia for real life experience: I don't think we should make too much of its connection to Oxonians who went to war, since it was written 1946-9 in the wake of a much more gruesome war.  Oddly enough, its connection to George Butterworth isn't mentioned in the booklet notes, a surprising omission in a compilation based on 1914-18. Butterworth and Vaughan Williams were so close that RVW might have not developed as he did without the influence of Butterworth, who pushed RVW creatively, and for whom RVW dedicated his Symphony no 2 "London" in 1913.

Please see my numerous other posts on Gurney, Finzi, Butterworth and RVW (use labels below)

Lest We Forget Prom - RVW Butterworth Stephan Kelly Manze BBC SSO

 "They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man, The lads that will die in their glory and never be old." 

 A E Housman was writing about handsome farm boys going off to the Boer War. Maybe he was more concerned with the loss of their physical beauty but Prom 42 "Lest We Forget"  with Andrew Manze and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra reminded us of the lost music which the three younger composers featured in this concert might have produced.

Roderick Williams sang George Butterworth's Six Songs From a Shropshire Lad.  He never disappoints. He sang with the commitment and heroism the occasion of a keynote Prom warrants. I've written extensively about George Butterworth, (read more here) so I'll just comment on the version  we heard here. It's not strictly Butterworth but a modern orchestral adaptation. Butterworth wrote two separate pieces based on Housman's verse, one for voice and piano and an entirely orchestral version, A Shropshire Lad: a Rhapsody. where the themes are reiterated. Maybe piano song doesn't work so well in the Royal Albert Hall, but it would have been wiser to pick the orchestral piece. Much as I adore Roderick Williams, I think we need to appreciate Butterworth for more than his songs. When there is enough authentic Butterworth around, can't we "honour the fallen" by  using the man's own work?

Butterworth's orchestral A Shropshire Lad would have worked better with the rest of the programme too, especially with Rudi Stephan's Music for Orchestra no. 2 (1912, rev. 1913), Stephan's breakthrough piece which won him a publisher and a lot of favourable attention. It's superb. It's full of interesting ideas, crafted together with flair: definitely a distinctive voice. Listen to the rebroadcast : this isn't recycled retro but intelligent and highly original, reflecting the creative ferment of Secession Munich, and possibly the "modern" Germany of Weimar art and, film and literature. Stephan might have given Alban Berg (also a serving soldier) a great deal to think about. Stephan is definitely on the radar in Germany. There are no less than three recordings of his opera Die ersten Menschen on the market. I'll write about that when I have time - please come back.

In contrast, Frederick Kelly's Elegy for Strings was written in memoriam Rupert Brooke. Kelly is also remembered because he was born in Sydney of Irish parents and served in Gallipoli, and is thus a figure in Australian music history. It's a lovely, elegiac piece with a good violin part, but without the character of Stephan and Butterworth.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was too old to fight in the frontline but served in an ambulance unit, experiencing bombardment knowing he'd have to go out and pick up the carnage. Vaughan Williams's Symphony no 3 "The Pastoral"  may be "about " landscape in an abstract sense, but it's even more about the strange, new landscape of the trenches. Ancient farms and villages were flattened, pitted with craters like the moon. The terrain still hasn't recovered.  RVW's ambiguous swirling tonality suggests psychic dislocation. This isn't "cowpat school", though you can "feel" the mud. It's far more unsettling.

RVWs 3rd is a companion to his 2nd, the "London" Symphony, dedicated  to and inspired by George Butterworth, so hearing the 3rd at this Prom was particularly poignant. Andrew Manze and the BBC SSO  gave a dignified account. An excellent "distant" trumpet, and nicely defined references to typical RVW themes expressing nostaglia and, well, Sensucht,  and loss. Unusually, Manze used a tenor, Allan Clayton to sing the vocal part. A male voice is probably more appropriate in the circumstances  and RVW knew his Bible well enough to know that angels were often men. The trumpet can be diffuse, since RVW was remembering a real trumpeter playing in the landscape. But the dead and dying were all too present. Clayton's "manly" tenor rang out loud and clear. No, we must not shy from the reality of war. There's violence in the crescendi, and folk tunes pop up as  ghosts. Perhaps the voice, like the violin part, loosely reminiscent of The Lark Ascending, is reminding us that life, and nature, will soar upwards from the ruins.

The mystery of George Butterworth

Roderick Williams sang George Butterworth Songs from A Shropshire Lad at tonight's BBC Prom 41 at the Royal Albert Hall. Williams is by far the best best British song specialist around. He has such a warm. conversational style which makes his singing direct and personal. (Read more here) .For my review of the Lest We Forget Prom read here).

The photo at right show George Butterworth  in civilian days. Read Michael Barlow's biography "Whom the Gods Love," (more here)  It's good, given the sparsity of source material. Butterworth was a very private person, and shielded himself from such things as prying historians. There are so many mysteries. Why did he destroy his unpublished music when he went to the front? There are no Butterworth descendants any more - George and his only male cousin died without issue. So perhaps we could  use modern intuition and reflect.

Butterworth's father's archives are in Oxford, but they're not completely reliable because they were compiled by a man who loved his son dearly but probably didn't understand his complexities any more than he understood military procedure. After reading Barlow's book I went to the War Office Archives to read regimental documents. Shock! No "Butterworth" listed!  However, being a good archivist, I think like a detective. I found the original war diary kept by the commanding officer of Butterworth's unit, where each day's events were written as they happened, sometimes in pencil.  I found the actual record of Butterworth's death. Read my account "George Butterworth in the trenches" . I also found his original medal citations by searching under his third forename, Kaye. Somehow, by accident or design, he had been listed as Kaye-Butterworth rather than Butterworth when he signed up.

Finding the war diary is easy enough because British officers' records are extensively documented. But that started another mystery. His fellow soldiers didn't even know he was a musician.  He wasn't actively hiding anything because the army contacted his father after his death. But one wonders who Butterworth might really have been. An Oxford don, on seeing the student Butterworth with a friend, remarked that they were two of the "reddest" revolutionaries in Britain.

Why was Butterworth keen to keep his lives as soldier and composer apart? Was he gay, or conflicted about his father's remarriage ?  By the standards of his time, A E Housman was about as much out of the closet as was possible. The poems in his collection of A Shropshire Lad are heavily homo-erotic. Obviously, orientation doesn't dictate art. The very hetero Ralph Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge is based on Housman's poems too.  But one wonders what Butterworth might have achieved had he not been killed so young. Would he have stayed in the Cecil Sharp fold  with its repressive neo-fascist style? Would he have found a creative breakthrough like RVW? RVW adored him. His  London Symphony was inspired by Butterworth, who pushed RVW towards symphonic writing.  Even Carlos Kleiber liked Butterworth's orchestral music. We shall never know what Butterworth might have achieved,  but I suspect we shouldn't assume that Butterworth was "simply" a writer of folk-inspired songs and pastorals.

Three Choirs Festival Worcester 2014

Tickets go on sale 15/4 for the 2014 Three Choirs Festival, this year in Worcester, the city where Elgar grew up. This is also the first year the Festival has been curated by Dr Peter Nardone. Moreover, this year marks the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. The Three Choirs Festival mirrors a type of Englishness that has survived centuries of strife and change. Perhaps we can better appreciate that "Spirit of England" by engaging with The Three Choirs Festival and what it represents.

This year's Three Choirs opens on Saturday 26th July. Perhaps the Opening Service at 11.30 in Worcester Cathedral will mean more than usual, given what is being commemorated. You don't have to be a Christian to care. We all share (I trust) universal faith in goodness, humanity and hope. At 2.30,  Roderick Williams, easily the greatest baritone in this genre, presents a recital on The Great War in English Song, built around George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad. Butterworth was killed in the Somme in 1916. There's a lot about him on this site, including something I found in the War Office archives which no one had found before. Please use the "Butterworth" label at right.

This year, London's Globe Theatre  tours to Worcester: a very special event indeed. The Globe will be doing Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing at 3.30 in the College Hall. T.hen, at 745 in Worcester Cathedral itself, Britten's War Requiem. Britten wasn't a Three Choirs regular, and the piece isn't conventionally religious. Please read what I've written about the War Requiem, Britten and Britten's pacifism on this site, using the labels at right. If ever there was an occasion when the Three Choirs ethic and Britten dovetail, this will be it. This War Requiem could be a coming-together on a very deep level.

Many concerts during Sunday 27th. Alternatively, you could visit Elgar's Birtthplace at Broadheath three  miles from the city centre. Excellent museum, with very well stocked CD shop. There will be other opportunities to visit during the week, and specially curated Walking Tours through the countryside Elgar was so fond of visiting. Sunday night will be a good chance to savour Three Choirs hospitality at the King's Hall - Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding! After which one will be well fortified for Dvořák’s Stabat Mater in Worcester Cathedral, which Dvořák himself conducted at the Three Choirs Festival in 1884. The Choirs was very much in the vanguard of "new" European music when it was new.

This tradition continues: On Thursday, 31/7 in Worcester Cathedral, Torsten Rasch A Foreign Field will receive its premiere. It's a Three Choirs commission,  and will be heard with Elgar's The Spirit of England and Vaughan Williams' A Lark Ascending. The concert, titled Reflections of 1914, will be another significant coming-together. Two of the greatest British composers, responding to a war that would change their world, and a youngish German composer who has travelled the world, reflecting on what went before him.  Rasch grew up in a tradition very close to the Three Choirs: he was a boy chorister with the Dresdener Kreuzchor, which produced Peter Schreier and Rudolf Mausberger (lots about them on this site too). Rasch's music embraces wider genres. He emigrated to Japan as a young man and has worked in theatre, film and multi media.  Read more about him here.

But without Elgar, no Three Choirs Festival would be complete. This year's Elgar highlight will be The Apostles, on Friday,1st August in Worcester Cathedral. This is a hugely ambitious, even extravagant work and should be stunning with the massed choirs. Good cast, too : Andrew Kennedy, Brindley Sherratt, Sarah Fox, Claudia Huckle, Neal Davis, Marcus Farnsworth, conducted by Adrian Partington. This week  BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting Mark Elder's Proms Apostles which I wrote about here. The photo shows Elgar conducting The Apostles in Worcester at the 1905 Three Choirs Festival. Don't recognize the organ? The performance took place in The Public Hall, Worcester, demolished in 1966 when the city centre was rebuilt. .

Jacques Imbrailo Wigmore Hall

I'll be at The Royal Opera House Wagner Parsifal  Monday. Review here. But first: Jacques Imbrailo at the Wigmore Hall, with pianist Alisdair Hogarth.The programme didn't look promising in theory but Imbrailo is the kind of artist who can make anything interesting and individual.  At the end I was so glad I came that I didn't miss the rush at Covent Garden!

What thread would connect the songs of Liszt, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Stephen Hough? Imbrailo's choices revealed great intelligence and sensitivity. He began with RVW's early Songs of Travel, unfortunately marred because latecomers were allowed in while he was singing.T he ushers at WH are kind hearted but it's really not fair on the audience and on the performer. Luckily the RVW songs are not the composer's finest works but served to highlight what was to come. Imbrailo sang them with his customary warmth. When Terfel and Roderick Williams sing these songs they sound robust, the kind of "Muscular Christianity" that appealed to Late Victorians. When Imbrailo sings them, his lighter, more lyrical voice broiught out something more sensitive. His "Let Beauty Awake", "Youth and Love" and "Whither must I wander?" felt like sincere songs of love and regret. RVW ends the cycle with  " I have tread the upward and the downward slope", where the piano describes clodhopping footseps : Hogarth played them with a flexible touch, to match Imbrailo's gentleness.

Only ten years separate Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel from George Butterworth's Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad but the two cycles are worlds apart. The Songs of Travel bear the heavy, suffocating hand of Charles Villiers Stanford, from whom RVW only escaped when he went to France and studied with Ravel. Butterworth was only 13 years younger than RVW but his mindset was radically different. When Butterworth was a student at Oxford, one of the dons remarked "There goes more Red Revolution than in all Russia". Considering that the remark was made after the Uprising of 1905, this was not small talk. Butterworth was also far more upper crust and Establishment than RVW. He was an Eton man, not easily intimdated by Stanford, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. This year, with so much attention on Britten's alternative British music, we should be reassessing Butterworth more deeply.

A E Housman's poems from A Shropshire Lad were set by Butterworth and RVW a mere two years apart. Anyone seriously interested in the composers would do well to compare them. It's not my job here in this review, but I might write more sooner or later. There is more on Butterworth on this site than most anywhere else, and some first-hand research. Please explore.

Imbrailo's "Loveliest of Trees" was thoughtfully phrased. He lingered on the words "stands about the woodland ride" so one thought about the tree, rooted to its soil. Then, when Imbrailo sang "wearing white for Eastertide", his voice glowed with beauty. Men grow old, but each Spring, the cherry tree blossoms and grows anew. English singers tend to stress vocal lines at the expense of more abstract musical values  Imbrailo, with his extensive opera experience, showed masterful control of the legato in "Look not into my eyes", revealing the beautiful structure of the song. Like the Grecian lad, its beauty is elusive : danger lies in those seductive lines.

Butterworth's "The Lads in their Hundreds" has become connected with the mass slaughter of the 1914-18 war partly because the composer himself was a casualty (Please read my account of his death in battle). Housman, however, was writing about the Boer War, and the terrible waste (to him)  of handsome young men. But the Boer War was gruesome. It saw mass ethnic cleansing and the invention of concentration camps. We would do well to ponder the Boer War as a prototype of what was to happen in Europe, in the mass public "celebrations" that start next year.  When Imbrailo sang "The Lads in their Hundreds", he sang with such poignant tenderness, that he made me think of the wide-scale human tragedy that lies beneath the song. My partner's eyes filled with tears. We've all heard this song s often that we forget what it really means.

"We couldn't follow A Shropshire Lad" with something upbeat, said Imbrailo, in his usual understated way, introducing his first encore. So he sang My Sarie Marais, an Afrikaans folk song referring to the Great Trek, the mass migration of the Boer people across Southern Africa, and the wars which followed. The song has been adopted by military marching bands, which is ironic. Imbrailo, however, sang it with exquisite tenderness, so it felt poignantly personal.  As music, the song is naive, but Imbrailo's performance gave it emotional power greater than the "art" folk songs RVW and his peers collected. Sincerity makes all the difference!


Imbrailo's many fans had come to hear him sing the gloriously Italianate star turns he does so well. With Franz Liszt's Three Petrach Sonnets S270/1 (1842-6) he delivered.  Exceptionally lyrical singing, richly coloured and resonant. Yet, being the opera singer he is, Imbrailo doesn't simply make beautiful sounds, but infuses them with meaning. "E nulla stringo, tutto l'mondo abbracio" he sang.  His technical control is superb - this is how rubato should properly be used. His chest opened out and soared so you could feel "i sospiri e le lagrime e 'l desio" welling up from deep within. The piano lines are almost more beautiful, delicately sculpted by Hogarth. He and Imbrailo are an excellent team.

Like Liszt, Stephen Hough is a pianist who writes song. Imbrailo and Hogarth premiered Hough's Herbstlieder at the Oxford Lieder Festival in 2010. Please see my detailed review here.  Hearing it a second time, I could appreciate the subtle images, diminuendos like falling leaves and mists settling on a landscape. Curling lines that circulate like autumn breezes, smoky lines that blur. As a mood piece, it's atmospheric. Yet there's suppressed pain here, too. "Welcher wie ein weisses Stadt" leapt high up the register like a scream of anguish. Hogarth's piano pounded like an oncoming train "Bestürz tmich, Musik, mit rythmischen Zürnen" sang Imbrailo. A good performance, but what weill remain with me is the meory of Imbrailo singing Butterworth and My Sarie Marais.

The Lads in their Hundreds

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,
There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.

There's chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart,
And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,
And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,
And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.

I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

George Butterworth's setting of A E Housman's poem The Lads in their Hundreds.from A Shropshire Lad.  Housman had a thing for doomed young men, and quite possibly Butterworth did too. He had a strange death wish, burning his unpublished music before joining up. I've written a lot about Butterworth including an EXCLUSIVE account of what I found in his Regimental War Diary, a minute by minute account of his last moments, written partly in pencil, at the front. Butterworth's war records were difficult to track until I realized he was enlisted under his mother's name. There's so much about Butterworth we haven't begun to fathom. Ironically, Housman outlived Butterworth by 20 years.

The absolute best recording is by Roderick Williams described HERE, it's astounding. But listen to the "mystery" voice above .It's a very unusual performance but one I've grown to love.  The singer has such range and power yet he's singing delicate sotto voce barely above a whisper.  A bit like a Lamborghini purring on idle. That takes much more skill than blasting away. Because the singer has such natural colour in his voice he  he sounds more operatic than the typical English singer. Yet he's restrained, because the song isn't theatrical,. Some notes are a little high for a bass baritone, but he manages them, and it adds to the song because it brings out its hush tension. It's achingly poignant, as if the singer is suppressing extreme horror, because he doesn't want  "the lads" to hear what will happen to them, or disturb their innocence. This is a surprisingly perceptive, sensitive performance though it's far from "English school", and has increased my respect for the singer no end.  Excellent matching of images to pictures The "friendly" lad is the only one smiling!

You might also like from past years  : Wilfred Owen Dulce et decorum est,  Ivor Gurney Strange Hells, Bach  and the Sentry,  To the Prussians of England

Simon Keenlyside in Vancouver

From my friend Barbara Miller - Simon Keenlyside, Malcolm Martineau, Chan Centre for Performing Arts 25 Oct 2011

The lovely 1200-seat Chan Shun auditorium was largely full for this long-awaited recital by baritone Simon Keenlyside and pianist Malcolm Martineau.  I was feeling relieved and relaxed after a short and smooth border crossing that left time for a delicious dinner.  The program was in four sections: Selections from the Rückert and Des Knaben Wunderhorn lieder by Mahler, Butterworth’s first set of songs from A Shropshire Lad, Lieder by Strauss, and finally, melodies by Duparc and Debussy.   At the beginning it was announced that the recital was being recorded  for later broadcast over CBC (this in the context of warning us to be extra good about turning off cell phones, turning pages quietly, and waiting until the ends of sets to begin applause—we couldn’t let all of Canada witness Vancouver’s gaffes) .  It was not specified when this broadcast would take place; interested listeners should presumably check the CBC website.

The artists took the stage and began the Mahler set, which was sung and played well enough but didn’t come completely alive for me.  One big problem was Keenlyside’s distracting mannerisms, often seeming unsure of quite what he wanted to do with his hands, reaching for the piano but not always taking hold of it,  then quickly moving to the lapel of his three-piece suit, bringing both hands together, and at some points taking a handkerchief from his inner pocket and wiping his face. Some of these actions, combined with a few soft high notes being lost below the accompaniment in this set made me wonder whether he might not be feeling well, but if that were the case I don’t think he could have sung the whole recital as well as he did.  At times his gestures expressed the song very well, and he could be very still and attentive during postludes, which made me regret all the more the nervous energy that drove the gestures much of the rest of the time, presumably in the interest of making the lovely sounds he produced.

There were some very nice touches in this set, though.  In addition to Malcolm Martineau’s  ravishing nightingale effect in  “Ich ging mit Lust” and buzzing bees in “Blicke mir nicht in dieLieder”, I admired Keenlyside’s gutsiness in stage-whispering the word “glanzen” at the end of the third line of “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt”. “Liebst du um Schönheit” was beautifully sung, with expressive color contrasts bringing out the words.  The set ended with “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? “, sung with the energy and breath control it requires to sing the long melismas, eliciting an appreciative giggle from the audience at the end.  Overall the set was pleasant to hear but I didn’t feel completely connected with it.  I couldn’t help wondering whether these songs had originally been undertaken in observance of the recent Mahler anniversary rather than from a deep feeling for them on the part of the singer.

This feeling changed dramatically with the next group, George Butterworth’s first set of songs from  A. E. Housman’s  A Shropshire Lad. I always find it interesting when singers feel the need to speak from the stage, to explain their choices, as it were, and Keenlyside chose to do that with this set of “pretty English songs” as he at first labeled them.  I didn’t catch all of what he said (perhaps an incentive to try to pick up the broadcast), but I did hear him say that  these songs are thought of as “War Songs” due to Butterworth’s untimely death in the World War I trenches.  Rather than focusing on the horrors around them, soldiers tend to write about what they miss, which is what all travelers miss, home, pubs, friends, etc., and  Keenlyside  thinks that maybe these songs are “overcoloured by war”. The message I got was that a singer with an international career that keeps him travelling all the time (last night in Vancouver, tomorrow night in San Francisco, each a continent and an ocean away from home) may feel a deep personal resonance with the longings for the English countryside  he hears expressed in these songs.  Now we began to hear wider ranges in vocal color: “Loveliest of trees” began with a quiet, floated sound, the “wise  man” in “When I was One-and-Twenty” had the booming, authoritative voice of an elder lecturing a youth who reacted with a more meditative sound.  The artists took very short pauses between the songs, “Think No More Lad” taken as an attaca after “Look Not In My Eyes”, as if to shut down the dangerous thoughts lurking under the evocation of Narcissus.  “The Lads in Their  Hundreds” was almost chatty in its enumeration of the faces seen at the fair, pausing to ring out with the strength worthy of the largest opera houses on the last word of “the lads that will die”.  A flawlessly executed dialogue between the pale voice of  the ghost/memory of the dead friend and the resonant but uneasy voice of the living narrator gave the needed chill  to “Is My Team Ploughing”, which closed the set and the first half of the program.

The second half opened with the Strauss songs, where Keenlyside’s voice blossomed in the operatic phrases.  The program included the familiar “Das Rosenband” and “Ständchen” (on which every lieder duo seems compelled to make its mark these days, since it closed Strauss sets by both Christianne Stotijn and Measha Brueggergosman, at the recitals I heard last year).But I was more impressed by the floated phrases and strong vocal presence in “Befreit”, and the spookiness of “Waldesfahrt”, which suffered from the disadvantage of having the wrong  text printed in the program.  While the audience was left to try to figure out where in Körner’s poem “Im  Wald, im Wald” the singer was, I put the text aside as soon as I heard the opening line “Mein Wagon rollet langsam” from Heinrich Heine, and watched Keenlyside visualize the impish face at the window of his coach and the creepy feeling it gave him about his love.  In reading scholars’ speculations about why Robert Schumann’s setting of this text was dropped from the final “Dichterliebe”, I saw the complaint that Schumann’s setting lacks precisely this creepiness that Strauss captures, so it was a treat for me to see it expressed so well in Keenlyside’s performance.

The French set that closed the prepared program was beautifully executed. Keenlyside’s voice was particularly effective in the transparent, slightly nasal French vowels, adding a whole new feeling to the program.  Duparc’s “Le Manoir de Rosamonde” was almost fierce in its delivery, setting up the sensuality of “Phidylé”.  Whether the audience believed that the switch in composers from Duparc to Debussy indicated the end of a “set” or because it was so enraptured by the performance of the song, they burst into applause after Phydilé (sorry, Canada, sometimes you just can’t help yourself—I guess you had to be there).  The Debussy songs were among his lighter and more charming ones, beginning with the early  “Nuit d’Étoiles” and ending with the witty “Mandoline”,which closed with an articulated, meaningful look between the accompanist and singer on the final struck note that brought laughter to the audience.

After several curtain calls to acknowledge the standing ovation, the artist at last reappeared with music in the pianist’s hand.  There were four encores in all, the singer’s introductions to them making it clear that they had a great deal of personal meaning to him.  There was again a frisson of the itinerant singer’s possible homesickness when  Keenlyside said that, for him, coming home is coming home to Schubert, and therefore he would sing “Der Wanderer an den Mond”, where the traveler envies the moon for being at home anywhere.  The performance by both pianist and singer was less “folksy” and more legato and even boomingly resonant than I often hear it, and it was particularly poignant to see the singer blow a kiss afterward to the audience member to whom he was dedicating the song.  The second encore was actually announced as two songs in one take.  He explained that he wanted to sing Percy Grainger’s setting of “A Sprig of Thyme” for his cousin, finding Grainger’s folksong settings “not quite as louche as some of Britten’s arrangements.” But prior to that we were treated to a lovely performance of John Ireland’s “Sea Fever”.  Enthusiastic applause continued after these songs, so we were treated to one more encore, Schubert’s  “An mein  Klavier”, which, sure enough, Keenlyside sang to the nine foot Steinway grand piano itself, growing gradually softer and more intimate with each strophe, leaving us with this tender melody in our ears as we made our way through the lovely Chan center lobby to our cars.

A jonquil, not a Grecian lad : George Butterworth Roderick Williams

Roderick Williams sings George Butterworth. This new recording, English Song Series 20: Songs From a Shropshire Lad, is the finest ever. It's a landmark, even by his high standards.

It's no secret that I've adored Williams for years, not all that long after he was still appearing with a map of Africa  shaved into his hair. Now he's easily the most important exponent of English Song. Hyperbole, perhaps, but Williams really is special, and one of the greatest specialists in English music. (hear him at 3 choirs).

English song has suffered from extra-musical affectation, smothered by "cowpat". Hence fake bucolic pretentiousness, fey preciousness, ghettoizing the genre. But the best of English song is so good it doesn't need stylistic coating. Roderick Williams's approach is direct, unfussy, revealing the true artistic merits of what he sings.

George Butterworth is one of my great passions, (please see other posts on this site including THIS.) . I've heard many performances, but  this new CD includes  the finest version of Songs From a Shropshire Lad I have ever heard. Listen to the clarity. and vividness. It feels like you're in a one to one conversation. Because Williams's style is unmannered, there are no barriers, it's personal. And what a voice - naturally warm, very secure in the middle register which Butterworth favours.

"A jonquil not a Grecian lad". Often the third song in Butterworth's cycle is overshadowed by more popular songs like The Lads in Their Hundreds, but Williams understand that it isn't necessarily the big, "public" moments that make the cycle, but  the elusive intimacy.  

Look not in my Eyes refers to Narcissus who was so beautiful everyone lusted for him. But his purity was preserved when the Gods turned him into a delicate flower. Butterworth sets the poem with curving sensuousness, but it's the purity that really counts. Williams emphasizes the word "jonquil" simply by respecting the microseconds of silence that set the word apart from the rest of the sentence, colouring the word itself with a reverent sense of wonder. An amazing moment.

Grecian lads die or are corrupted, but flowers bloom again each Spring. AE Housman didn't actually spend much time in Shropshire, and Butterworth was a terse, repressed  Londoner for whom the idea of unspoiled nature meant more than reality. Don't be seduced by verdant trappings. These songs are about a lot more than the countryside. Roderick Williams and his pianist Ian Burnside access the deeper levels in these songs, revealing their true beauty.

Williams doesn't make the opening arc in Loveliest of Trees dominate,  but shows how the arc repeats throughout: "wearing white...for Eastertide". Purity is of the essence. Too much heat makes blossoms wilt before their time.  Williams breathes gently into words, just enough warmth to bring out their fragrance.

The flowers are beautiful, but they're also a metaphor for the passing of time, which hangs over the whole cycle. The lads in their hundreds are partying, but soon will die, as Butterworth did, aged only 30, in battle. The dead farmer talks to his friend who has already taken up with the dead man's girlfriend. When I was one and twenty is a play on youth and age. The poet talks like he's old, but only a year has gone by.

Time hangs heavily too on Butterworth's Bredon Hill and Other Songs from a Shropshire Lad.  Butterworth's setting  seems more straightforward than Ralph Vaughan Williams's, but Butterworth's exists only as piano song, without the extra instrumentation that makes RVW's versions soar.  RVW created his cycle after his musical breakthrough, working with Ravel. Butterworth, thirteen years younger, never had the chance.

Williams and Burnside make a case for Butterworth's cycle. Listen to When the Lad for Longing sighs. Butterworth's minor key is so eerie that it wavers almost towards the pentatonic. Then, On the Idle Hill of Summer, the main phrase curving up and down. The song operates on several levels. Languid summer on the surface, but undercut by images of war and death.  "East and west on fields forgotten, bleach the bones of comrades slain". It's not a dreamy day in the Cotswolds.

Williams shapes the odd, unsettling phrase archly, so the curves are almost sinister. Butterworth was fascinated by the potential in this piece, creating the orchestral miniature that's so well known.  He didn't know that he'd end up dead on the Somme, but we do. Williams sing with poignant dignity.

More rarities - the second recording of Folk Songs from Sussex and the little known Requiescat.  The pioneer recording, by Mark Stone, was made in November 2009. It must have spurred Naxos into action, as Williams's recording was made in  January 2010. Stone is good and deserves credit. In any case, Butterworth fans need both recordings, as Stone's includes rare video footage.  Besides, Stone's own label is independent and worth supporting (read about another very good recording on the label  HERE)  Needless to say, Naxos's sleeve notes are useless and misleading, while Stone's are very good indeed. If I praise Roderick Williams, that doesn't diminish Mark Stone, Williams is just unbeatable in this genre, by anyone..

Nonetheless, Roderick Williams is infinitely more experienced, and his insight is unsurpassed. The Sussex Songs are simple, but Williams gives them such character that you wonder why they've remained unrecorded for so long (they've been sitting in the archives for years, and have been published by Stainer and Bell).

Folk songs these are but Butterworth isn't "folksy". Williams' s singing is crisp, energetic, direct, matching the jaunty rhythms. Seventeen Come Sunday has complicated nonsense phrases which Williams enunciates nimbly. He even manages to mimic the old Sussex rural accent when it helps colour the songs. The flirtatious girl, who salaciously sings "Roving in the dew makes the milkmaids fair". In Tarry Trousers, Williams sings both mother and daughter! The accents aren't overdone. Williams sings the pompous young man in Yonder stands a lovely creature, then the girl's biting putdown: simple, crisp semi-staccato. These songs came from Sussex, but the people they depict could be anywhere, even today.  Unbelievably good sound quality, too - the slight echo in Requiescat may or may not have been deliberate, but it's suitably spooky.

photo credit Tina Manthorpe