If you’re game for an off-the-beaten-track musical adventure, this inspiriting album by percussionist Delia Stevens and harmonica and melodeon player Will Pound is a must listen.
In just 54 minutes and over 12 tracks the doughty duo explores the transformation of British music during the English Folk Revival of the early 20th century, when composers like Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams tramped the country’s hedgerows and highways collecting, transcribing and often reimagining what at the time felt like a rapidly vanishing tradition of national folk music.
Classically trained, Stevens is a BBC Radio 3 award-winning artist. Pound, who learns scores by ear, is a three-time BBC Radio 2 Folk Musician of the Year nominee. Together, their aim is to reimagine classical music, with its complex formal structures, through the fluid lens of folk. As the artists write in their emotive sleeve note, “Ascending is not about preserving tradition behind glass, but about letting it breathe, change, and rise – alive in the present, and always reaching upward, building upon what has become before and since.”
There are so many places one could begin here, but first how about the sound world. At the music’s heart is Pound’s turbocharged harmonica and melodeon – he often plays both simultaneously – creating a rich, multitextured wash that might surprise classical listeners unused to hearing a virtuoso on these instruments. The result makes moments like the duo’s take on Jupiter from The Planets seem almost orchestral in richness, though the timbre is utterly different. Stevens, it appears, plays pretty much anything that falls into her hands, though the vibraphone is a predominant colour in some of the more elaborate sounding tracks. Elsewhere, she plays toy piano, a tiny ring of bells, which she can either strike with a stick or stroke with a violin bow. When she has a hand free, she is like or not using it to tap out a rhythm on whatever she can reach.
The album opens with Larking, their own composition, a folkish stomp that gets the toes tapping from the get-go. Rhythmically and harmonically it’s not a million miles removed from Sir Roger de Coverley, the English country dance tune used by Holst in the finale of his St. Pauls Suite (where he so brilliantly juxtaposes it with Greensleeves). It sets things up nicely for the duo’s treatment of Holst’s five-movement suite further down the line. It segues neatly into their riff on Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, the music instantly recognisable yet uniquely different when played on harmonica and vibes (the latter at their most ethereal when bowed).
Ascending is another original piece, set high on melodeon with tuned percussion and atmospheric modal harmonies. It leads into Jupiter, one of the most joyous takes on Holst’s original you will ever hear (toy piano and vibes shimmer as if the planet itself is beaming down from the heavens above). At the epicentre of the program is Earth: The Silent Planet, an original work setting words by British writer Robert Macfarlane reflecting powerfully on the future of our own imperilled planet. I’ll confess, I’m not always enamoured of the spoken word against music (I’m more of a song person) but here it works beautifully thanks to the sensitive way Steves & Pound’s music responds to the text and Macfarlane’s poetry as spoken by the man himself.
The St. Paul’s Suite is the most substantial piece here, also the closest at times to the classical original. It’s infectious music in the base case, rendered even more so by Stevens & Pound’s folk-inflected rhythms and colourful instrumentation. The result reflects its traditional roots to a greater degree than Holst probably imagined possible.
The album concludes with a magical take on Norwegian Wood, reminding us of the influence of traditional Indian music on Lennon and McCartney in the late 1960s, early 70s, before a rip-roaring accordion-led take on the classic Sailor’s Hornpipe brings it all to a close.
The album was recorded in state-of-the-art sound in multiple studios including the Wood Room at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios and at Guy Chamber’s Sleeper Studios using the same desk on which the Beatles recorded Norwegian Wood at Abbey Road.
Anyone with half an interest in the impact of folk music on the classical scene in 20th-century Britain will find much to intrigue here. Above all, Ascending is the most original thing I’ve heard in years. Pure joy from start to finish.
Title: Ascending
Works: Music by Vaughan Williams, Holst, Lennon & McCartney et al.
Performers: Stevens & Pound
Label: IDIOM Records IDMRC-AL002
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