Warlock: Yarmouth Fair

Following its award-winning Christmas album, Sleep, Holy Babe (Naxos 8572868), Blossom Street explores a wide-ranging sequence of British folk song settings for choir, with a particular focus on the nautical. The repertoire embraces pioneers in the rediscovery and arrangement of folk songs such as Vaughan Williams, Grainger and Warlock, adds little-known gems by Holst and Bairstow, and also introduces vibrant new additions to the repertoire from contemporary composers, including James MacMillan and Judith Bingham and the conductor herself.

Sleep, Holy Babe (8572868), Blossom Street’s last album with Naxos, was selected as one of ClassicFM’s Christmas CDs of the Year.

These recordings, made over the space of a decade from March 1954 to December 1964, capture Peter Pears in the high summer of his career and at the peak of his powers, a period roughly framed by some of the highlights of his partnership with Benjamin Britten: the creation of the character of Peter Quint in the composer’s The Turn of the Screw in Venice in September 1954 and the euphoric response to the first performance in 1962 of the War Requiem, one of the great events of post-war English musical life. The title ‘An Anthology of English Song’ was chosen by Decca for a projected three volumes featuring Pears. The first, with Julian Bream, included Renaissance lute songs by Dowland, Morley and others. The second was presumably intended to included 18th and 19th-century titles but was never made. The third, made in 1955, consisted of 20th-century English song, and much of this material appears on CD for the first time [CD2: 10-21].

A year earlier, Pears and Britten recorded nine of Britten’s folk song arrangements; these particular recordings (made in the same sessions as those for Winter Words) too receive their first release on CD [CD2: 1-9].

More British song was recorded with Britten in 1963 and with pianist Viola Tunnard (who worked closely with Britten in the 1960s, particularly on the Church Parables) in 1964. Of special interest too, will be works Pears commissioned from contemporary composers including the Cycle for Declamation by the South-African-born Priaulx Rainier, a testing tour de force for unaccompanied voice and Richard Rodney Bennett’s dramatic 1961 setting for voice and cello of the anonymous 17th-century ballad Tom O’Bedlam’s Song.

Peter Pears’ voice was undoubtedly one of the finest and most distinctive of the twentieth century and here he collaborates with Julian Bream and Benjamin Britten in performances of English song. Repertoire includes works by Ford, Morley, Rosseter, Dowland, Pilkington, Campion, Bridge, Butterworth, Ireland, Moeran, Warlock, Holst, Berkeley, Oldham and Britten.

Ranging from Shakespeare’s contemporaries to the Victorian school and beyond, this fine box set calls on some of the greatest artists—including a wealth of British talent—to celebrate the diversity and longevity of English song. From simple melodic expression to the textural sophistication of orchestral settings, with the sea and landscape assuming a prominent role throughout, the songs included here comprise a fitting tribute, simultaneously revealing the rich cultural legacy of English poetry.