Monday 23rd June
The Baritone and Piano combination of Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn are equal partners and masters of English song. In this concert, broadly with a folk connection, they perform works dating from late 19th and 20th centuries.
Note that Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn normally provide descriptions as part of their performance, and these brief notes are no substitute for their insights.
John Ireland’s published works are mostly small piano pieces or settings of poems. All of the works here are settings of British poets. The concert opens with “Summer Schemes” from “Three Songs to Poems by Thomas Hardy”. This was composed n 1925 only three years after the text was published. The famous pastoral poem expresses waiting for the return of summer through the sounds of birdsong and flowing water.
“Down by the Salley Gardens” is a poem by William Butler Yeats published in 1889 that describes loss and regret from the standpoint of young love. It has inspired several composers and originates from folk songs heard by Yeats in County Sligo, though much can be said to be Yeats original work. The Ireland setting is part of a song cycle, “Songs Sacred and Profane,” dating from 1920 to 1931. Later in the programme, we shall hear Rebecca Clarke’s setting of the same poem, and Ivor Gurney’s from 1938.
Ireland’s “We’ll to the Woods No More,” is from a cycle of three songs dating from 1928 two of which are Houseman settings, and one for solo piano. This poem is part of a 1922 collection, “Last Poems” that inspired musical settings immediately after publication that are mostly concerned with a retrospective view of the loss of youth.
Two of John Masefield’s poems set by Ireland are performed next: “Sea Fever” is one of his best known settings. The poem, that expresses a yearning for new adventures, appeared in “Salt-Water Poems and Ballads”, and dates from 1902, with the collection published in 1916. We also hear his setting of The Vagabond, also concerned with the need to travel, from 1922.
To end this performance of Ireland settings, the less well known “Youth’s Spring-Tribute,” from Marigold with libretto, originally written as a sonnet, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that is concerned with the arrival of Spring with a parallel of the beauty of youth.
In addition to “Down By The Salley Gardens,” Rebecca Clarke set several of WB Yeats poems, including “The Cloths of Heaven” in 1912 from the poem “Aedh Wishes for the the Cloths of Heaven” published in 1899. This is a love poem in which one the narrator describes a desire to give his partner the best of material things, but is only able to offer dreams. Finally we hear her strongly engaging setting of the dramatic parts of “The Seal Man” by Masefield, composed in 1922, and frequently revised thereafter. This poem is a tragic love story in which a sea creature that can morph between man and seal lures women into the sea. Rebecca Clark sets this from the standpoint of the seductive power of nature.
The meditative poem, “A Song of Enchantment” by Walter de la Mare paints the picture of the slow and relentless passage of time. Here we hear it set by the Irish composer Ina Boyle from around 1940. Ina Boyle was a student of Vaughan Williams, whose folk song collection and settings are of course key to his output. We also hear her rapturous setting of “The Joy of Earth” from George William Russell dating from 1914, predating her association with Vaughan Williams.
Joan Trimble only published 24 works despite a long career in music. Of only three songs and one song cycle, “Green Rain” with words by by Mary Webb expresses the beauty of a blackthorn forest and “My Grief on the Sea” from Irish Gaelic text by Douglas Hyde is another outpouring of sorrow and longing. Both of these settings are both from 1937.
Charles Wood’s “I’d Roam the World Over for You” premier recording was made by Roderick Williams in May 2025. Much of Wood’s output is Anglican church music, but this song is secular with an anonymous Irish text that is an amorous love song.
Describing travelling with no particular destination, Michael Head’s setting of Masefields poem “Tewkesbury Road” from 1924 is inventive and powerful.
Freya Waley-Cohen’s song cycle, “The Moon, the Moss and the Mushrooms” is a recent commission with its premier performance being given by Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn at the Two Moors Festival in September 2024. The setting derives from multiple poet’s texts including those of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and relates to the folklore of Exmoor.
To conclude the programme, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Songs of Travel,” written between 1901 and 1904 is a tour de force of English folk song settings from the early 20th century. All nine songs from the cycle are included here, including the posthumously published, “I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope.” This is an early work by Vaughan Williams, and follows the familiar story line of other wanders such as in Schubert’s Winterreise, and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, but with a very English flavour.