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Five works to try after Butterworth’s Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad
After completing his two sets of songs setting Housman’s poems, George Butterworth also composed a related ‘orchestral rhapsody’ that he eventually called
A Shropshire Lad (he jettisoned two earlier titles, The Land of Lost Content and The Cherry Tree). A work of extraordinary poignance, it opens with a mournful stillness before a clarinet solo plays a melody, recognisable from his ‘Loveliest of trees’, that provides the main theme. (Hallé Orchestra/mark Elder Hallé CDHLL7503).
Housman’s poems proved a draw to a fair number of British composers in the early 20th century, not least Arthur Somervell, who set ten of them in his A Shropshire Lad from 1904. Beginning with ‘Loveliest of trees’ and rounded off by ‘The lads in their hundreds’, Somervell’s cycle leads us on a journey in which a young man initially basks in the joys of spring before, song by song, introducing us to life’s darker elements, including the painful repercussions of romance and, as war looms, the call to arms. (Roderick Williams (baritone), Susie Allan (piano) Somm SOMMCD0615).
No composer showed a greater devotion to the work of Housman than CW Orr, who made regular visits to Shropshire for the purposes of research. The Cheltenhamborn composer wrote various Housman settings, including the seven-song cycle A Shropshire Lad, which he worked on from 1927-31. (Mark Stone (baritone), Simon Lepper (piano) Stone Records ST8012).
Another Gloucestershire composer to show his admiration for Housman’s depictions of Shropshire was Ivor Gurney, who wrote his gently lyrical cycle Ludlow and Teme shortly after returning from action in the First World War. Here, added instrumental colour is provided by a string quartet. (James Gilchrist (tenor), Anna Tilbrook (piano), Fitzwilliam String Quartet Linn CKD296).
And no Housman-inspired collection should be without Vaughan Williams’s 1909 On Wenlock Edge, also for tenor, piano and string quartet
(the composer also later made an arrangement for orchestra). From the fraught, crackling opening of ‘On Wenlock Edge’ itself to near-motionless in ‘Bredon Hill’, this is a cycle of dramatic contrasts. (Adrian Thompson (tenor), Iain Burnside (piano), The Delmé Quartet Hyperion CDH55187).
CW Orr made regular visits to Shropshire for the purposes of research