Composer: Peter Dickinson, Madeleine Dring, Geoffrey Poole, Nathan Williamson, John Woolrich
Performer: James Gilchrist, Nathan Williamson
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: SOMM
Catalogue: SOMMCD0646
Release: 2022
Size: 774 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: cover
01. Dickinson: Let the Florid Music Praise (Version for Tenor & Piano)
Dickinson: 4 W.H. Auden Songs
02. No. 1, Look, Stranger
03. No. 2, Eyes Look Into the Well
04. No. 3, Carry Her Over the Water
05. No. 4, What’s in Your Mind?
Dring: 5 Betjeman Songs
06. No. 1, A Bay in Anglesey
07. No. 2, Song of a Nightclub Proprietress
08. No. 3, Business Girls
09. No. 4, Undenominational
10. No. 5, Upper Lambourne
Williamson: The Little That Was Once A Man
11. No. 1, In Someone Else’s Poem
12. No. 2, 4am
13. No. 3, Not Being the Ordinary Way
14. No. 4, Not Being Misunderstanding
15. No. 5, Moon at Rest
Woolrich: The Unlit Suburbs
16. No. 1, The Submerged Bar
17. No. 2, Rat Town
18. No. 3, The Ghost Choir
19. Williamson: Intermezzo
Poole: The Eye of the Blackbird
20. No. 1, Twenty Snowy Mountains
21. No. 2, The Autumn Wind
22. No. 3, I Was of Three Minds
23. No. 4, Which to Prefer
24. No. 5, Icicles
25. No. 6, I Know Noble Accents
26. No. 7, Out of Sight
27. No. 8, He Rode Over Connecticut
28. No. 9, Evening All Afternoon
Receiving first recordings are John Woolrich’s settings of Irish poet Matthew Sweeney, The Unlit Suburbs, a deadpan yet evocative exercise in “alternative realism”, and Geoffrey Poole’s stylistically wide-ranging The Eye of the Blackbird, with texts from Virginia Woolf, traditional Nigerian poems, Wallace Stevens, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Requiem Mass. Also for the first time are Williamson’s own song-cycle setting poems by Bryan Heiser composed especially for James Gilchrist, The Little That Was Once a Man, and solo-piano miniature, Intermezzo. Peter Dickinson’s early, accomplished Four W.H. Auden Songs and dramatic and intense yet positive and joyful Let the Florid Music Praise, and Madeleine Dring’s characterful Five Betjeman Songs, the product of a “fascinating and multi-faceted artistic personality”, complete this programme.