By C.W. Orr and his contemporaries
Ben Alden tenor
Andrew Plant piano
CD available at www.ben-alden.com
The background to this disc is given in its subtitle ‘A celebration of love and the English Landscape underpinned by the poetry of A.E.Housman’.
Ben Alden’s lyrical voice and perceptive performances are enhanced by his regular accompanist Andrew Plant ,who also introduced him to some of this repertoire. Alden tells us that he was brought up in Suffolk near to the Maltings in Snape where this disc was recorded but now he has family associations with Shropshire – Housman country , hence the lovely colour photos of these areas in the excellent booklet which includes his essay and a much more detailed one by Andrew Plant, as well all of the texts.
We are offered 23 songs by 14 composers with eight settings of Housman including Butterworth’s setting of When I was One and Twenty. I cannot go into all of them but will pick out a few which seem to be especially of interest.
Three of the composers are new to me and possibly to you. English songs of the twentieth century, especially when Housman is set, verge on the melancholy and slow. Take for example The Cherry hung with Snow by Colin Ross, whom I only know because he worked at Hereford Cathedral as a young man, and I sing there. It is a deep and nostalgic setting quite unlike the Butterworth. Another rare composer is John Jeffreys. We have two of his Housman settings and they capture the mood perfectly. One of them was composed for another fine tenor, James Gilchrist.
C.W. Orr lived in the picture book village of Painswick in Gloucestershire, – Ivor Gurney country, and these composers form the focus of this disc. Personally, I do not always find Orr’s songs quite so interesting as Plant seems to, but I do like Bahnhofstrasse, a setting of James Joyce, which Warlock attempted but never finished.
It is interesting that Orr sets The lads in their hundreds in the same compound rhythm as Butterworth but less memorably. Orr bravely set Is my team ploughing? This holds up very convincingly and, one might say, is a more mature view of the poem than the young Butterworth.
As for Ivor Gurney, he was friendly with Wilfred Gibson, one of the ‘Dymock Poets’, and All night under the moon is a searching setting of a powerful nature poem. Gurney’s poems are as good as anyone’s, witness the famously nostalgic and deliciously performed Severn Meadows.
Although some of these songs are rarely encountered this disc offers a good introduction to British Song, and it is surely an ideal place to start.
Review by Gary Higginson