Marcus Farnsworth baritone
Eric McElroy piano
NAXOS 8.574599
Part of Naxos’s laudable English Song Series, this is the successor to the Gurney disc by Susan Bickley and Iain Burnside from 2009. As such, it may be considered well overdue and compels the hope that several successors are planned.
It has long been known that, despite the pioneering work of Finzi, Ferguson, Scott, and others that resulted in the five invaluable volumes of songs published by OUP, many treasures were overlooked. Of the 26 items here, 14 are receiving their first recording, the majority at least 100 years after they were written. For this largesse, much thanks to the editorial team of Philip Lancaster and Ian Venables.
Marcus Farnsworth proves himself a fine advocate for Gurney. His diction is impeccable – I listened blind on a first hearing, and not a single word was indistinct – and his command of colours is admirable, with a pleasingly mellifluous top to the voice, strongly evident in Snow, Red roses, and Twa Corbies. The heart-easing legato in Blaweary and The fields are full is especially refulgent. All the tempi are finely judged: a vital consideration with Gurney, whose characteristic mercurial dissolving in and out of tonalities can so easily sound wayward without a firm grasp of structure.
Only Down by the Salley Gardens struck me as a touch matter-of-fact, but this is to split hairs. Eric McElroy’s highly accomplished pianism is also a constant pleasure, from the cheerfully crisp, rather Warlockian, Hawk and Buckle, to the mysterious tapping of The Ghost.
Gurney’s musical fingerprints are clearly discernible, even in unfamiliar repertoire. Tarantella (Belloc’s jangling poem beginning ‘Do you remember an Inn / Miranda?’) opens with figuration recalling I will go with my father a-ploughing. The Halt of the Legion has some of the colours of the threatening On the downs, while Western Sailors (very likely Gurney’s last song and another setting of his own words) ends curiously but tellingly on an unresolved dominant seventh.
The familiar Snow is also presented in a corrected edition, while two other lyrical settings of Thomas will be new to almost everyone: the moving In memoriam (Easter, 1915), which really should be published as soon as possible, and a charming conversational setting of Adlestrop.
In addition to Edward Thomas’s ‘birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’, it should be noted that some proud avian songsters from Herefordshire, where the CD was recorded, may also be heard on at least four tracks, but they are generally very faint, and not inappropriate. In short, this is a splendid and essential release.
Review by Andrew Plant