Composer: William Turner Walton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Huw Watkins, Roger Quilter
Performer: Carolyn Sampson, Joseph Middleton
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: BIS
Release: 2020
Size: 1.33 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
William Turner Walton:
A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table (Version for Soprano & Piano)
01. No. 1, The Lord Mayor’s Table
02. No. 2, Glide Gently
03. No. 3, Wapping Old Stairs
04. No. 4, Holy Thursday
05. No. 5, The Contrast
06. No. 6, Rhyme
Ralph Vaughan Williams:
07. 3 Songs from Shakespeare – No. 3, Orpheus with His Lute
08. The Sky above the Roof
09. The House of Life – No. 2, Silent Noon
Frank Bridge:
10. Go Not, Happy Day, H. 34
11. When Most I Wink, H. 5
12. Adoration, H. 57
13. Come to Me in my Dreams
14. When You Are Old, H. 142
15. Mantle of Blue, H. 131
16. Love went a-riding
Huw Watkins:
5 Larkin Songs
17. No. 1, Who Called Love Conquering
18. No. 2, Wants
19. No. 3, Love Songs in Age
20. No. 4, Money
21. No. 5, Dawn
Roger Quilter:
22. Dream Valley, Op. 20 . No. 1
7 Elizabethan Lyrics, Op. 12 (Excerpts)
23. No. 7, Fair House of Joy
24. No. 6, By a Fountainside
25. Arab Love Song, Op. 25 . No. 4
26. Autumn Evening, Op. 14 . No. 1
27. No. 2, My Life’s Delight
William Turner Walton:
3 Songs to Poems (After “Façade”)
28. No. 1, Daphne
29. No. 2, Through Gilded Trellises
30. No. 3, Old Sir Faulk
Song composition has been a constant in British music since the lute and consort works of the early seventeenth century. By 1900, it had developed into a sophisticated genre embraced by almost all serious composers. The music on this amply-filled disc illustrates the diversity of British song-writing and its transformation over a century: from Vaughan Williams’s Orpheus and his Lute (ca 1901) to HuwWatkins’s Five Larkin Songs, composed in 2010 for Carolyn Sampson, who performs them here. Together with Joseph Middleton, her partner on several acclaimed recital discs, she has devised a highly contrasting programme bookended by two groups of songs by William Walton – A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table from 1962, celebrating the diversity of London, and three songs from Façade, the ‘entertainment’ with which the young composer gained both fame and notoriety in 1923.These frame settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilterand Frank Bridge of poetry by writers from Shakespeare and Shelley to Keats and Yeats. In comparison, the anti-romantic poems by Philip Larkin have been described as marked by ‘a very English, glum accuracy’. Huw Watkins (b. 1976) has selected texts from across Larkin’s output, catching the various moods – ranging from a certain unsentimental nostalgia to the poet’s seemingly habitual pessimism – in settings that often carry a bittersweet sting in the tail.