Music at Paxton: A Programme of British Song
Paxton House - 22/07/22
The Picture Gallery at Paxton House is sold out for the first concert of this year’s Music at Paxton Festival. The Paxton Estate, like other parts of the eastern Borders, was severely hit by Storm Arwen and lost many trees, but the grounds are colourful with floral tubs, the Marquee is in place, and the Picture Gallery is back to full capacity last year’s very welcome, but still distanced events.
Baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Susie Allan present a programme of British Song which includes a commissioned song cycle composed by Sarah Cattley. Also on stage is Jerome Knox, a young baritone, a graduate of Edinburgh University and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Opera School.
The concert is also part of the festival’s celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the songs in the first half are written by composers whom he taught or influenced. We begin with George Butterworth’s ‘Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad’. Butterworth was a friend of Vaughan Williams and shared his enthusiasm for folksong. These setting of A. E. Housman’s poems are firmly set in this tradition. After a delicate piano opening, ‘Loveliest of Trees’ begins with a short unaccompanied phrase in the higher baritone range. An ear-catching moment, and Williams captures the solemnity of the young countryman, his knowledge that “of his three score years and ten, twenty will not come again” as well as his joy in the “cherry hung with snow.” The next three poems in this selection show the development of the narrator in love, but always with an undertone of things coming to an end. He gives advice, “Think no more Lad, laugh, be jolly; why should men haste to die?” Jerome Knox takes over on stage for the two songs specifically about war, firstly ‘Lads in their Hundreds’, the longest and, in its repeated verse structure, the most folk-like of the songs. After celebrating the participants of the Ludlow Fair, the final line in each verse points out how many will die young: “the lads that will die in their glory and never grow old.” The final song, ‘Is my Team Ploughing?’ is about an individual tragedy. With pared-down plangent accompaniment, we hear four questions from a dead soldier to his living friend. After Knox’s first question about the farm, Williams leaps to his feet to answer. The song, usually sung by a soloist, gains from this format. The dead man moves chillingly to the questions about his former sweetheart and then about his friend’s welfare. The friend’s final admission is that he “cheers a dead man’s sweetheart, never ask me whose.” It’s a conclusion almost as shocking as the end of Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting: “I am the enemy you killed my friend….” That poem and Britten’s War Requiem concluding music suggest consolation after the shock, with the repetition of “Let us sleep now.” The Butterfield song with the singer’s last note left in the air and the questioning piano phrase gives no such certainty.
I cannot imagine the cycle being better sung, and it sets the scene for a remarkable concert. Williams is a generous performer, ensuring that his diction, stage presence and communication skills always enhance the beauty of the music. He’s lately shown this generosity too in his advocacy for the new charity Momentum (momentumnow.org ) founded by his friend Canadian soprano, Barbara Hannigan. She became aware that after the pandemic younger artists would find it had to recover their careers. Knox’s participation in this concert – not just a token gesture, but on the stage at all times, taking his turn naturally to sing some of the songs – is part of this initiative, which is fully supported by Music at Paxton. On this showing it works very well. Knox, initially displaying some nerves, has a fine voice, and his previous performance experience shows.
The next group of songs feature writing about the countryside. Settings by Charles Orr of Housman and John Ireland of Hardy focus on small scale natural delights with impressionistic piano accompaniment – Ireland’s ‘Lent Lilies’ evoking windy spring weather. Peter Warlock and Ernest Moeran were friends whose gently lyrical songs, settings of Belloc and James Joyce, belie the programme’s stories of their scandalous drunken lives in a Kent village. Gerald Finzi’s setting of ‘It was a Lover and His Lass’ is perhaps the best known song in this section, with its fast moving accompaniment and an exuberant ‘Hey ding a Ding Ding’ chorus.
Williams says he has been educating himself in the contribution of women composers to British song-writing and has included three songs by women. To my mind, Elizabeth Maconchy’s other song from ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘The Wind and the Rain’, is even better than Finzi’s. It’s an exciting piece with different rhythms going on in the voice and the piano, and with the piano mimicking the sound of rain. It’s given a suitably dramatic and vigorous presentation by Roderick Williams and Susie Allan. I would love to hear it again but can’t find an accessible recording online. Ruth Gipps’ quirky but quieter ‘I Bended unto Me’ is difficult to find too, although Rebecca Clarke’s ‘Down By the Sally Gardens’, a pleasing alternative setting of Yeats’ poem, has several YouTube versions. Unsurprisingly there are performances and recordings aplenty of the male composers’ work!
A short cycle of songs by Ivor Gurney ends the first half. Gurney survived the Great War but, his mental health fragile, spent his later life in asylums. He was a promising pupil of Vaughan Williams and composed much before and after the breakdown of his health. From the war onwards he wrote many poems, although a great deal of his music and poetry remains unpublished. We hear a setting of his own poem about his Cotswolds and two by his friend Frederick Harvey. Harvey was made a Prisoner of War, and to boost his morale, Gurney sent him a jolly setting of a Masefield poem, celebrating the joys of rum, ‘Captain Stratton’s Fancy’. Williams performs this piece, yes with a hint of tongue in cheek, but with attention to its old-fashioned good cheer, which sends us off smiling happily to the interval.
The café isn’t open in the evenings, but making a virtue of necessity, Paxton is raising funds by asking for donations for interval drinks in the courtyard. It’s an efficient operation - glasses of red and white wine and elderflower cordial are already poured and the queue moves swiftly. (This may remind social historians of the pubs at the shipyard gates, where pints were set out on the counter at the end of the shift and the workers rushed in with the exact money for the cashbox!)
Sarah Cattley’s cycle of ‘Five Poems of Frances Cornford’ is written as a companion piece to Vaughan Williams ‘Songs of Travel’. In her programme introduction, Cattley says that she admires Cornford’s lovingly observed details of domestic life and “her rootedness in a place.” The songs focus on home – “the antithesis to travel,” and take place over a day from one morning to the next. The countryside is mostly seen and heard from inside the poet’s cottage. The third song describing the interior is typical in its close detail, “The firelit loaf; the cocoa-tin; the cup,” yet the piano accompaniment indicates the wilder sound of the rain outside. A ghost is conjured, and Susie Allan knocks on the piano.
Unusual musical sounds are a feature of the set. One song ends with some crooned gentle vocalised phrases from Williams, in another he blows into his hands to imitate the “far-off owl” and whistling is heard in the last song. The Coast, Norfolk celebrates the life of the only other character in the poems, the old man who mows grass. His companions, the finches and the seagulls are also evoked in the music. These are songs written about a woman’s life, but, as Williams has also noted, the “restrictions” about what is suitable repertoire for a male or a female singer have broken down recently.
There’s warm applause at the end of this imaginative work, and the composer, Sarah Cattley is delighted after the work’s second performance – the first was at Thaxted Festival in early July. The commission was partly funded by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, and merits further outings and hopefully a recording.
The programme concludes with Vaughan Williams ‘Songs of Travel’, again with Williams and Knox sharing the honours. Robert Louis Stevenson gathered many poems from different parts of his career under the Songs of Travel title, and Vaughan Williams set nine of them, between 1901 and 1904, with the last, ‘I Have Trod’, discovered posthumously and added to the set in 1960. The singing and playing here emphasise the arc of the songs, from the optimism of travel in the persona of the Vagabond, through the dreams of a beloved, and the pull of home. Knox’s singing of ‘Roadside Fire’ which begins “I shall make you brooches and toys for your delight” is warmly lyrical. The increasing unhappiness of the narrator calls for a lower register in the later songs, and Williams’ fine voice resonates in the ringing deeper notes. There are thoughts of exile and death in the last three songs, which compare a Scottish landscape with an imagined death and burial elsewhere. A premonition by the poet, or maybe just our interpretation of the lines after his early death in Samoa.
