English baritone Roderick Williams’s love of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s music goes back to his school days, and when he wanted to celebrate the great man’s 150th birthday in 2022 he took as his inspiration Gerald Finzi’s tribute 80 years earlier, the song cycle Let Us Garlands Bring.
One of those songs, Who is Sylvia?, from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, is lovingly performed on Williams’s own birthday garland, a collection of 30 songs by RVW’s teachers, contemporaries and students, along with a brand new song cycle and one of the singer’s own schoolboy efforts.
The baritone has been singing this collection, his ‘fantasy birthday party concert’, in recitals with pianist Susie Allan and their collaboration has been honed to perfection for this 76-minute album on the prestigious British independent SOMM label. RVW’s teachers, Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood, are all represented, as are European mentors Maurice Ravel and Max Bruch and friends Gustav Holst, George Butterworth and Herbert Howells.
His students included an impressive array of women, and modernist settings by Ruth Gipps (1921-99) and Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-94) sit neatly alongside Rebecca Clark’s lovely arrangement of WB Yeats’ Down by the Salley Gardens and Madeleine Dring’s (1923-1977) earworm Take, O Take Those Lips Away from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
The poets are as important as the composers, of course, and Lord Alfred Tennyson and Walt Whitman rub shoulders as popular choices. RVW’s setting of Tennyson’s The Splendour Falls with its full-blooded “Blow bugles blow” refrain immediately shows Williams’s superb sensibility and excellent diction, as well as his great chemistry with Allan, who shines on the next track, Wood’s arrangement of Fortune and her Wheel – also Tennyson – with its Schubertian Gretchen am Spinnrade-style accompaniment.
Williams’ story-telling gift and his way with the vernacular is given vent in RVW’s Linden Lea, with William Barnes’s lines given a subtle Dorsetshire burr, while he does a highly passable Scottish accent in Ravel’s Chanson ecossaise (Ye Banks and Braes) – memories of Kenneth McKellar here!
He gets into character for Butterworth’s southern English folk song Roving in the Dew, playing a posh gent trying to inveigle a milkmaid whose tongue proves sharp. Not content with singing in English, Roderick shows his Welsh heritage on his father’s side with the charming traditional song Jim Cro.
Whitman’s poems were tackled by Holst, Ina Boyle (an Irishwoman and a pupil of RVW), Ivor Gurney, Stanford and RVW himself. Gurney’s setting of Reconciliation is most moving with its hints of O Come Emmanuel.
RVW’s setting of his wife Ursula’s poem Menelaus has some of the most poetic piano writing on the disc, and a highlight of the album is the first recording of the entertaining song cycle A Square and Candle-lighted Boat by Sarah Cattley (b.1995), which was written specially for the Music at Paxton and Thaxted Festivals with support from the RVW Trust.
This lovely disc is nicely rounded off by Williams’s setting of William Blake’s The Shepherd, written when he was still at school.
Title: Vaughan Williams: A Birthday Garland
Works: Songs by Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Finzi et al.
Performers: Roderick Williams bar, Susie Allan p
Label: Somm SOMMCD0683
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