Roderick Williams

RPS award winning soprano Joan Rogers is joined for Wolf's Italian songbook by acclaimed baritone Roderick Williams, with Roger Vignoles at the piano.

This new recording for Champs Hill Records was made shortly after their recital at Wigmore Hall, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, in April 2012. "Each of the three brought sensitivity and experience to the poetry at their comman, the end result being a performance of much beauty, feeling and most welcomely for this repertoire - joy" Opera Britannia

Self-ciritical of being master of 'only a small-scale genre' Hugo Wolf made carefully structured collections of his songs, each a tiny drama in music. It means that his Songbooks are much more than a random collection and, as with The Italian Songbook, they represent his attempt to make something more substantial, to tell a bigger story, to create a kin of 'compressed' opera.

Wolf, who died in 1903 following a period of insanity brought on by syphilis, described The Italian Songbook - his las major work - as "the most original and perfect of my compositions"

Wolf sets his Italian texts, in German translation, with extraordinary wit and perception - in 'Mein Liebster hat zu Tische mich geladen' (my sweetheart invited me to dinner), the piano accompaniment reflects the very poor meal, right down to the accents representing the chopping of very stale bread. 'Mein liebster singt' (My sweetheart is singing outside the house) incorporates the lover's serenade in the piano part - a music sounds like a Chopin mazurka.

‘Layton has directed this annual St John Passion for several seasons now. His readings, which are becoming ever more dramatic and daring, have a raw intensity. It was easy to see why these concerts have become one of the highlights in London’s musical calendar’ (The Guardian)

Polyphony and Stephen Layton present their celebrated performance of Bach’s most dramatic masterpiece. Accompanied by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a starry team of soloists, Layton directs a vivid account, the excitement of the narrative drama contrasting with heartbreaking moments of reflection.

In Ian Bostridge, we have the most iconic Evangelist of the last twenty years; an artist who is an incomparable communicator, a singer of technical brilliance, and an impassioned, experienced interpreter of Bach’s music.

The Starlight Express was adapted from a book by Algernon Blackwood, A Prisoner in Fairyland, for a theatre production in the West End during the First World War, with music by Sir Edward Elgar. Combining the usually contrasting elements of fairytale and melodrama, The Starlight Express depicts the fantasy world inhabited by a group of children, who possess a magical ‘starlight’ quality that has been lost by the adults around them. This is the most comprehensive recorded version of The Starlight Express to date, based on a new score prepared by the Elgar Edition, which has been adapted by the conductor Sir Andrew Davis.

Our recording includes, in place of the play, a detailed account of the story, penned by the conductor Sir Andrew Davis better to reflect the original book and our pattern of speech today. ‘All the music, excepting the songs and interludes, was designed as melodrama, and in some cases it is meaningless on its own’, explains Sir Andrew, continuing: ‘I have therefore taken the bold step of writing a narrative which is based partly on the play and partly on ‘A Prisoner in Fairyland’.

Our narrator is the actor Simon Callow, known to an international audience for his roles in films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love. Callow was delighted to be approached, as he already knows and loves this music, having delivered the narrative in a specially recorded concert performance of the incidental music, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2007. The incidental music, complete with melodramatic passages which work in conjunction with the narrative, occupies all of Disc 1 and continues onto Disc 2. Then we have an extended suite of freestanding orchestral movements and songs.

As a bonus, we have included three songs which link directly to this work. When a staged version of Blackwood’s book was first proposed, in 1914, another young composer, Clive Carey, was commissioned to compose the incidental music; but the outbreak of war forced the cancellation of the original production. When the plans were next revived, Elgar was approached, and he enthusiastically completed the score. However, Clive Carey had already composed three songs, but they were never included in the final production. They have been orchestrated by Sir Andrew Davis for this recording, and are heard here for the very first time.

Our recording of The Starlight Express is performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Sir Andrew Davis with two internationally acclaimed soloists: the soprano Elin Manahan Thomas and baritone Roderick Williams.

Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki present their long-awaited second volume of secular cantatas by J.S. Bach.

The “Hunt Cantata”, composed in 1713, is the oldest of his secular cantatas. The libretto includes a dramatic plot in which four divinities from ancient mythology appear.

Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht was intended for the 1719 New Year celebrations in Köthen. The cantata is set as a dialogue between Time (tenor) and Divine Providence (alto), who in the final movement are joined by a chorus wishing ‘glückseligen Zeiten’ (‘joyous times’)

Britten wrote his Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, Op. 74 for the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1965. The singer admired the ‘concentration and enigmatic smile’ of the settings, and Britten constructed, through alternation of proverbs with songs, and an intense contemplation on the human and the eternal, one of his greatest song cycles. By contrast Tit for Tat sees Britten revisiting youthful, light-spirited settings of the poet Walter de la Mare. The folk-song arrangements are amongst his most famous, and beloved.

Britten’s song cycles are some of the greatest produced in the twentieth century. This disc focuses on his Blake cycle, one of his deepest and most contemplative. It’s contrasted with a very different and youthful cycle of five called Tit for Tat, written when he was a teenager.

The baritone Roderick Williams encompasses a wide repertoire, from baroque to contemporary music, in the opera house, on the concert platform and in recital. His recital appearances have taken him to London’s Wigmore Hall and many European festivals. He has an extensive discography and his recordings of English song with Iain Burnside have received particular acclaim.

Berio had an abiding fascination with reconciling the past and the present, which can be seen in his orchestral realisations of works by Mahler and Brahms, and most notably, in Rendering (1990), his typically creative completion of unfinished symphonic sketches by Schubert.

In Rendering, Berio – in his own words – sets himself the target of ‘following those modern restoration criteria that aim at reviving the old colours without, however, trying to disguise the damage that time has caused, often leaving inevitable empty patches in the composition’. In the ‘restoration’, Schubert’s sketches have been beautifully orchestrated in period style, and the ‘empty patches’ have been filled with music composed by Berio himself, in his own voice – thereby successfully combining the musical worlds of the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries into one convincing whole.

The Clarinet Sonata by Brahms embodies the composer’s taut and concentrated compositional style. In transcribing the work, Berio felt that, when experienced in the less intimate surroundings of today’s concert halls, the extreme compression of Brahms’s late chamber music style was in need of some additional support, and his version, recorded here, includes a fourteen-bar orchestral introduction to the first movement, leading into Brahms’s own, much shorter opening phrase, as well as five additional bars at the beginning of the second movement.

Berio completed his orchestration of six early songs by Gustav Mahler in 1987, and conducted the first performance with the Toscanini Orchestra on 7 December that year, with Thomas Hampson the baritone soloist. The six songs in this orchestrated set are ‘Hans und Grete’, ‘Phantasie’, ‘Scheiden und Meiden’, ‘Erinnerung’, ‘Frühlingsmorgen’, and ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’.

The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Edward Gardner, with Roderick Williams the baritone soloist in the songs by Mahler and Michael Collins the soloist in Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata.

One of England’s most distinctive composers, George Butterworth belonged to the generation of young men decimated in the Great War of 1914-1918.

His sensitive and melancholic settings of poems from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, with their subject matter of the futility and arbitrariness of war, are small-scale masterpieces. Of particular note are the ‘Loveliest of Trees’, describing the passing of the seasons, and the ghostly and elegiac ‘Is my team ploughing?’

The Folk Songs from Sussex and settings of poems by R. L. Stevenson, Shelley and Wilde, whose subject matter revolves around flirtation, love, courtship, marriage and desertion, are no less notable for their attention to detail, linguistic nuance and delicate, economical piano writing.

Dutton Epoch’s survey of tuneful short works by John Ireland (including the last two unrecorded songs orchestrated by Ireland himself and sung here by Roderick Williams) is filled out with a selection of encores by British composers and two unrecorded orchestral songs by Elgar. The overture by Tranchell, a gorgeous interlude by Walter Collins and tuneful folk dance arrangements by Herbert Murrill are coupled with more substantial fare by Lionel Sainsbury – a muscular and invigorating Allegro Risoluto for strings and Elis Pehkonen’s evocative and finely drawn orchestral sunset, Sunset and Evening Star.

This is the debut disc from Albion Records which is a subsidiary of the Vaughan Williams Society.

Albion Records Ltd, a not-for-profit record label, is dedicated to recording rare 20th century English classical music, concentrating on Ralph Vaughan Williams and each of the CDs will contain world première recordings.

This first CD issued by Albion Records, through Select Music, The Sky Shall Be Our Roof, comprises of 19 songs from Ralph Vaughan Williams operas. An astonishing 12 of these songs are world première recordings and all are deeply characteristic, in turn noble and beautiful.

The disc boasts the talents of Iain Burnside, Roderick Williams, Juliette Pochin, Sarah Fox and Andrew Staples.