Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge

On 24 June 1936, Peter Pears joined his BBC Singers colleague, contralto Anne Wood, at Decca’s studio in Upper Thames Street in the City of London to make his very first commercial recording, of Peter Warlock’s setting of the Corpus Christi carol for unaccompanied voices. The year marked a turning-point for Pears: he met Benjamin Britten that April at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Barcelona, joined a vocal group, the New English Singers, and set off on his first trip to North America, on tour with them in November. This Warlock premiere makes its first ever appearance on Decca CD.

Of course, Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings is inextricably linked with Pears as well as with Dennis Brain, and marks one of the most important of all Decca premieres, particularly given the label’s association with both Britten and Pears. But also of interest are the recorded premieres of Britten’s British and French folk song arrangements by Pears (British folk songs) and the Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss (French folk songs) in the 1940s. All of these make their first appearance on Decca CD, the Sophie Wyss recordings added as a sort of ‘bonus’ midway through the (Pears) CD.

Vaughan Williams’s cycle On Wenlock Edge focuses more on the middle register of Pears’s voice (unlike the upper reaches in Britten’s Serenade). As with the Britten cycle, the first appearances of these recordings received glowing praise in the music press.

Now rightfully acknowledged as a towering figure, Vaughan Williams was the first composer to write in the English language, using folksong in the Norfolk Rhapsody, a Tudor hymn in the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and absorbing and transforming his influences in the stunningly beautiful Serenade to Music.

During the 16th and 17th centuries England had been a leading participant in the delevopment of European music, but after the early death of Purcell in 1695, music in England came to be dominated by musicians of foreign origin: notably Handel and Mendelssohn. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is the best-known of a new generation of composers that came after Elgar and made up what became known as the English Musical Renaissance. Along with Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams travelled the country collecting and preserving English folksong traditions, and was largely responsible for the revival of interest in folksong. So strong was his interest in the subject that, like Holst, folksong was absorbed into his compositional style and was to influence his concert music, giving it a uniquely English quality. Starting with the evocative Thomas Tallis Fantasia, (RVW's look back at his great 16th-century predecessor) this set contains some of the composer's best-known and most-loved music, including the popular Fantasia on Greensleeves and the beautiful Lark Ascending.

This CD features songs by Vaughan Williams and Quilter, and is the premiere recording of The Bliss of Solitude by Andrew Wright. He was a member of the Tallis Scholars and has been director of music at Brentwood Cathedral for many years. Initially, Wright set a couple of Wordsworth’s texts and then worked them into a song cycle and the result is stunning. The work reflects his knowledge of the voice and love of nature. This CD was recorded in Brentwood Cathedral.

On Wenlock Edge is a song cycle for tenor, piano and string quartet, published in 1909, setting six poems from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Although there have been a number of recordings of this song cycle recently, this disc features the remarkable voice of Mark Padmore and uniquely adds the early Piano Quintet in C minor, recently released for performance by the composer’s widow and published in 2002, and also the Romance and Pastorale, two similarly early, brief lyric pieces for violin and piano published in 1923. The Quintet was written for piano, violin, viola, cello and double-bass – as was Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet. It is a wonderful early work, full of passion and melodic invention.

This recording marks the Schubert Ensemble’s debut on Chandos and also its 25th anniversary. The Ensemble has always been at the forefront of British chamber music performance and is now firmly established as one of the world’s leading exponents of music for piano and strings.