A Shropshire Lad
Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad; Vaughan Williams: The House of Life; plus songs by Boyle, Browne, Burton, Clarke, Farrar, Gipps, Ireland (all orchestrated by Roderick Williams)
Roderick Williams (baritone); Hallé Orchestra/mark Elder
Hallé CD HLL 7559 72:46 mins
Although Butterworth’s AE Houseman cycle steals the headline on Roderick Williams’s new recording, Vaughan Williams is at its heart. Not only does his cycle The House of Life loom large, but there are three songs by women who studied with him, plus a scena by Rebecca Clarke who knew him. And reinforcing a separate subtext are songs by composers who lost their lives during the First World War.
Pre-eminently, of course, there’s another tie that binds: sympathetically supported by Mark Elder and the Hallé, Williams is accompanied throughout by his own orchestral reimaginings; and he’s evidently an orchestrator with a fine ear and lively imagination. A delicious languor hangs over Butterworth’s ‘Loveliest of Trees’, and the muted, vibrato-less string quartet at the beginning of ‘Is my Team Ploughing’ chills. In the Vaughan Williams cycle the orchestral quasi-epilogue to ‘Love-sight’ is delicately imagined, while ‘Silent Noon’s quiet rapture is luminous.
This is all exquisitely sung too. The melodic contours of English song flow through Williams’s veins. He modulates them beautifully, drawing on a career-long experience of how to pace and shade them.
How to interrogate the texts too. Ireland’s Sea Fever isn’t so much an imperative here as a lyrical disquisition with the words ‘when the long trick’s over’, setting the tone. Ina Boyle’s The Joy of Earth plants the Irish flag on an otherwise English songscape suffused with love, loss and transience, lovingly reconsidered and sensitively reworked. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★