|
H.
Walford Davies: Prospice Opening
|
|
H.
Walford Davies: Prospice Fear
Death
Fear death? - to feel
the fog in my throat
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts
denote
I am nearing the place....
|
|
H.
Walford Davies: Prospice Then
a light
Then a light, then thy
breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp
thee again,
And with God be the rest
|
Every so often one comes across
a recording which has long been available
but has somehow failed to attract much notice
or be widely subscribed by record stores,
and yet on investigation proves to be a complete
revelation. What better for a reviewer than
to revisit it with all the benefits of hindsight.
Such a CD, issued in 1994, is baritone Martin
Oxenham's Meridian programme of little known
songs for baritone and string quartet with
or without piano (or in one case just piano)
by British composers, the title number, Sir
Henry Walford Davies's nineties setting of
Browning's Prospice, particularly rewarding.
Prospice is the earliest of
these gems, dating from 1894, when Walford
Davies would soon end his time as a student
at the RCM. So music written with all the
vitality and freshness of early manhood, but
in no sense prentice-work; Walford Davies
demonstrates an imaginative mastery of his
chosen medium in a work which has a unique
personality of its own, and at its date must
surely have struck his contemporaries as impressive,
and innovative in the forces employed.
While the Walford Davies is
certainly the plum of this collection for
me, the others are pretty good too. Butterworth's
Love Blows as the Wind Blows
and Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs
were both completed around 1912. The latter,
though familiar in its choral-orchestral colours,
is unknown in this version for similar forces
to On Wenlock Edge. Later came Somervell's
A Broken Arc and still later, after
two world wars, Geoffrey Bush's cycle of six
songs Farewell, Earth's Bliss.
The impact and concision of
Prospice, and the eloquence of the
quartet writing reminded me of Samuel Barber's
Dover Beach, written 35 years on, with
which it would make an ideal coupling on concert
programmes.
Sir Henry Walford Davies has
been almost forgotten, Solemn Melody
and RAF March Past are still heard
occasionally, but his big choral works, extensive
orchestral music and even his once ubiquitous
church music forgotten. His fame as a broadcaster,
the first radio populariser of music, died
with him in 1941.
It all needs revisiting, but
even so, the power and eloquence of this early
setting - lasting just on ten minutes - is
entirely unexpected; one is surely not being
too extravagant in describing it as an unknown
late-Victorian masterpiece. If one mutters
'Brahmsian' at the melifluous opening string
melody, that really only defines a starting
point, for Walford Davies soon builds a remarkably
gripping little drama, which baritone Martin
Oxenham seems securely inside, the whole given
an enormous span by its composer's vivid handling
of his forces. The urgency of the first vocal
entry proclaims a young man who had recently
experienced an all too real brush with his
own mortality, though in fact he would live
for another 47 years. Thoroughly recommended.
Browning also provides the
dramatic text for Arthur Somervell's totally
unknown narrative cycle of eight songs A
Broken Arc, for voice and piano, which
must challenge his more familiar cycle Maud
for pride of place among his songs, though
one would never guess it was published as
late as 1923 - it could well be a backward-looking
work from the 1890s, or at least Edwardian
days. Here for his text Somervell ranges across
Browning's lyrics, both familiar and not so
well-known. This story of jealousy, the man
who shoots his friend on suspicion of his
liaison with his lady love, is vividly handled.
Least good is the last song, a final setting
of one of Browning's most familiar lyrics
'The year's at the spring' which is far too
careful to express the youthful ecstasy of
the words, and its place in the cycle makes
Somervell's intention difficult to read -
it is surely ironically.
|
George
Butterworth 'Love blows as the wind
blows'
In
the year that's come and Gone,
love, his flying feather
Stooping slowly, gave
us heart, and bade us walk together.
In the year that's coming on, though
many a troth be broken,
We at least will not forget aught that
love has spoken.
|
From that richly burgeoning
pre-Great War period we also have two more
familiar scores - Butterworth's delightful
Love Blows as the Wind Blows
and Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs.
In the chamber version of Love Blows as
the Wind Blows, Butterworth's cycle has
a fourth song, 'Fill a glass with golden wine'
not present in the orchestral version (recorded
by Stephen Varcoe on Chandos CHAN 8743). I
must say I like the added colour that the
full orchestra brings to this work, yet, in
the shadow of On Wenlock Edge, the
string quartet version with the addition of
Butterworth's bittersweet setting of 'Fill
a glass', in this eloquent reading brings
real rewards, while the quartet's figuration
evoking the river boat's engine in 'On the
Way to Kew' is charmingly done, the perfect
foil underlining the singer's lightness of
touch in these atmospheric songs.
RVW's Five Mystical Songs
set for baritone and piano sextet - no chorus,
no orchestra - is good too. It was an inspiration
to dig out RVW's own chamber version of this
evergreen work. Heard like this it is a lovely
score in its own right, but really puts the
soloist into the spotlight - here perhaps
a little bland, or is that a concomitant of
the chamber music scale and the forces used?
Whatever it is still a sweet discovery.
In this company, Geoffrey
Bush's lyrical Farewell, Earth's Bliss,
six setting of early seventeenth century lyrics,
completed in 1950, must have seemed backward-looking
in its pastoral aesthetic and approach, though
with memorable invention. And yet this is
in its own way a gritty and penetrating score.
Bush's familiar happy knack of finding a memorable
phrase or rhythm in fast songs is every bit
in evidence here in jaunty settings of Dekker's
'O, the month of May' and Edwardes's 'When
May is in His Prime'. Yet slow music predominates
and as the last song, a setting of Herrick's
'Fair pledges of a fruitful tree' is elaborated
into an extended and intense climax we are
reminded that it was first heard only five
years after the end of the War.
This is a most enjoyable exploration
of some worthwhile repertoire not easily found
elsewhere: I urge you to search it out while
it is still available.
Reviewer
Lewis Foreman
[Prospice (look
forward) is pronounced pros-pea-chay. LM]
Martin Oxenham (baritone); Bingham String Quartet;
Katharine Durran (piano). 