SOMM RECORDINGS is pleased to announce Dreams Melting, a revealing survey of British songs from the early 20th century by tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley.
At the recital’s heart are two substantial cycles. Setting seven poems by Thomas Hardy, Gerald Finzi’s Till Earth Outwears provides an intimate and movingly melancholic commentary in what Ronald Woodley describes in his extensive and informative booklet notes as a “male perspective on life, love and loss”.
Rarely recorded, Howard Ferguson’s five-part treatment of Denton Welch’s poems, Discovery, typifies “the subtlety of the relationship between late romanticism, modernism and the inherited idioms of ‘Britishness’ that composers of Ferguson’s generation inevitably grew up with”. Its second song, ‘Dreams Melting’, provides the recital’s title.
Three songs make their first appearance on disc. Elizabeth Maconchy’s setting of John Donne’s passionate but tortured A Hymn to God the Father boasts a searching vocal line underpinned by tellingly interrogative piano. Phyllis Tate’s The Falcon is a sparse but powerful setting of an anonymous medieval text while her variegated treatment of William Blake’s poem Cradle Song is reminiscent of a Bartók folksong arrangement.
Also heard are Maconchy’s Four Shakespeare Songs and settings of Ben Jonson’s Have You Seen but a Bright Lily Grow? and Robert Herrick’s A Meditation for his Mistress, alongside six varied and vital songs by Rebecca Clarke, including The Seal Man, “one of her most soaring flights of imagination”, and Tate’s Epitaph, in which her “quietly understated writing is masterly”.
A compendium of songs by William Walton and Constant Lambert, Façades (SOMMCD 0614), James Geer and Ronald Woodley’s debut SOMM release (with pianist Andrew West) was hailed by The Telegraph as “a wonderful collection of beautifully crafted miniatures”. MusicWeb International declared it “an absolute gem of a disc in every regard” and awarded it a Recording of the Year accolade.
On This Recording
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Howard Ferguson (1908-99) Discovery
- Dreams Melting
- The Freedom of the City
- Babylon
- Jane Allen
- Discovery
- The Seal Man
- The Cloths of Heaven
- The Cherry-Blossom Wand
- Infant Joy
- Cradle Song
- Tiger, Tiger
- A Hymn to God the Father*
- Have You Seen but a Bright Lily Grow?
- A Meditation for his Mistress
- Let Me Enjoy the Earth
- In Years Defaced
- The Market-Girl
- I Look Into My Glass
- It Never Looks like Summer
- At a Lunar Eclipse
- Life Laughs Onward
- Come Away, Death
- The Wind and the Rain
- Take, O Take Those Lips Away
- King Stephen
- The Falcon
- Cradle Song*
- Epitaph
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994)
Gerald Finzi (1901-56) Till Earth outwears
Elizabeth Maconchy Four Shakespeare Songs
Phyllis Tate (1911-87)
*First Recordings