Composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney
Performer: Benjamin Hewat-Craw, Yuhao Guo
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Ars Produktion
Release: 2022
Size: 250 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Vaughan Williams: The House of Life
01. No. 1, Love-Sight
02. No. 2, Silent Noon
03. No. 3, Love’s Minstrels
04. No. 4, Heart’s Haven
05. No. 5, Death in Love
06. No. 6, Love’s Last Gift
Butterworth: 6 Songs from A Shropshire Lad
07. No. 1, Loveliest of Trees
08. No. 2, When I Was One-and-Twenty
09. No. 3, Look Not in My Eyes
10. No. 4, Think No More, Lad
11. No. 5, The Lads in Their Hundreds
12. No. 6, Is My Team Ploughing?
Gurney: 5 Elizabethan Songs
13. No. 1, Orpheus with His Lute
14. No. 2, Tears
15. No. 3, Under the Greenwood Tree
16. No. 4, Sleep
17. No. 5, Spring
All three composers of this recording experienced the horrors of World War I, the deaths of friends and colleagues. The regret over a lost innocence is reflected in their songs.
Baritone Benjamin Hewat-Craw and pianist Yuhao Guo have taken the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth as an opportunity to present songs by British composers between the years 1904 and 1914. Both Ralph Vaughan Williams and lesser-known composers George Butterworth and Ivor Bertie Gurney fought in the First World War. More relevant today than ever, the recording links three different composers’ biographies, which for two of them came to an abrupt end with the onset of the Great War. Butterworth was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Gurney suffered from shell shock after his military service and spent the last 15 years of his life in a psychiatric ward. He died in 1937, 85 years ago.