PETER PEARS A Treasury of English Song

Transcription

1 Eloq uene PETER PEARS A Treasury of English Song BRITTEN DELIUS MOERAN WARLOCK GRAINGER BRIDGE BUSCH IRELAND TIPPETT BUTTERWORTH HOLST Peter Pears Benjamin Britten Viola Tunnard

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3 CD FREDERICK DELIUS ( ) 1 To Daffodils (Fair daffodils, we weep to see) Robert Herrik 2 13 ERNEST MOERAN ( ) 2 The Merry Month of May Thomas Dekker 1 50 BERNARD VAN DIEREN ( ) 3 Dream Pedlary (If there were dreams to sell) Thomas Lovell Beddoes Take, o take those lips away William Shakespeare 2 14 PETER WARLOCK ( ) 5 Piggesnie (She is so proper and so pure) Anon Along the stream (The rustling night fall strews my gown with roses) 2 28 Li-Tai-Po, adap. Launelot Alfred Cranmer-Byng (Saudades No. 1) PERCY GRAINGER ( ) 7 Bold William Taylor 3 41 WILLIAM BUSCH ( ) Two Songs of William Blake 8 The Ehoing Green (The sun does arise, and make happy the skies) The Shepherd (How sweet is the Shepherd s sweet lot!) If thou wilt ease thine heart Thomas Lovell Beddoes 3 00! Come, o ome my life s delight Thomas Campion 1 31 Peter Pears, tenor Viola Tunnard, piano FRANK BRIDGE Tis but a week Gerald Gould 1 41 Goldenhair (Lean out of the window, Goldenhair) James Joye 1 27 $ When you are old William Butler Yeats 3 32 % So perverse (All women born are so perverse) Robert Bridges 1 12 ^ Journey s End (What will they give me, when journey s done) Humbert Wolfe 3 10

4 JOHN IRELAND ( ) The Land of Lost Content Alfred Edward Housman & 1. The Lent Lily ( Tis spring; ome out to ramble the hilly brakes around) 2 18 * 2. Ladslove (Look not in my eyes) 2 15 ( 3. Goal and Wiket (Twie a week the winter thorough) 1 04 ) 4. The Vain Desire (If truth in hearts that perish ould move the powers on high) The Enounter (The street sounds to the soldiers tread) Epilogue (You smile upon your friend today) 1 34 # The Trellis (Thik-flowered is the trellis that hides our joys) Aldous Huxley 2 38 Three Songs Love and Friendship (Love is like the wild rose briar) Emily Brontë 1 48 Friendship in Misfortune (Give me the depth of love that springs) Anon The One Hope (When vain desire at last) Dante Gabriel Rossetti 3 34 MICHAEL TIPPETT ( ) Songs for Ariel William Shakespeare 1. Come unto these yellow sands Full fathom five 1 30 ª 3. Where the bee suks 0 56 Peter Pears, tenor Benjamin Britten, piano ALAN BUSH ( ) Voies of Prophets, Op. 41 º 1. For behold I reate a new heaven and a new earth Isaiah So at length the spirit of man will reah out John Milton Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age William Blake Over the years I hear strong voies rise Peter Blakman 8 43 Peter Pears, tenor Alan Bush, piano $ % ^

5 CD BENJAMIN BRITTEN ( ) Nine Folksong settings 1 The Salley Gardens (Down by the Salley Gardens my love and I did meet) Little Sir William (Easter day was a holiday) The Miller of Dee (There was a jolly miller one lived on the river Dee) Sweet Polly Oliver (As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed) The Bonny Earl o Moray (Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands) The Ash Grove (Down yonder green valley) A brisk young widow (In Chester town there lived a brisk young widow) There s none to soothe (There s none to soothe my soul to rest) Oliver Cromwell (Oliver Cromwell lay buried and dead) 0 43 FRANK BRIDGE ( ) 0 Go not, happy day Alfred Lord Tennyson 1 21 GEORGE BUTTERWORTH ( ) A Shropshire lad! Is my team ploughing? Alfred Edward Housman 3 45 JOHN IRELAND I have twelve oxen Anon ERNEST MOERAN ( ) In youth is pleasure (In an harbour grene aslepe whereas I lay) R. Wever 2 23 PETER WARLOCK ( ) $ Yarmouth fair (As I rode down to Yarmouth fair) Hal Collins 1 37 GUSTAV HOLST ( ) Twelve Songs, Op. 48 Humbert Wolfe % Persephone (Come bak Persephone!) 1 07 LENNOX BERKELEY ( ) ^ How love ame in Robert Herrik 1 16

6 BENJAMIN BRITTEN ( ) On this Island, Op. 11 W.H. Auden & Let the florid musi praise! 3 40 ARTHUR OLDHAM ( ) Three Chinese Lyris Evangeline Dora Edwards, based on anonymous Chinese texts * 1. Fishing 1 17 ( 2. Herd Boy s song 0 43 ) 3. Pedlar of spells 0 57 FRANK BRIDGE ( ) Love went a-riding Mary Coleridge 1 38 Peter Pears, tenor Benjamin Britten, piano RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT (b.1936) Tom O Bedlam s Song Anon Peter Pears, tenor Joan Dikson, ello PRIAULX RAINIER ( ) Cyle for Delamation John Donne # 1. Wee annot bid the fruits In the wombe of the earth Nun, lento sonitu 4 17 Peter Pears, tenor Total timing: T d ro p o T 1 p o li p in w M s in h p M w a w p o th n Ja

7 These reordings, made over the spae of a deade from Marh 1954 to Deember 1964, apture Peter Pears in the high summer of his areer and at the peak of his powers, a period roughly framed by some of the highlights of his partnership with Benjamin Britten: the reation of the harater of Peter Quint in the omposer s The Turn of the Srew in Venie in September 1954 and the euphori response to the first performane in 1962 of the War Requiem, one of the great events of post-war English musial life. Throughout this period, Pears and Britten performed regularly in reital, travelling inreasingly further afield inluding an almost world-tour in , whih took them to the Middle and Far East and at the same time, the singer himself saw his areer develop independently in opera, reital and oratorio, as he beame known in partiular for his performanes as the Evangelist in Bah s St. Matthew and St. John Passions. The onnetion with Dea whih for Pears had begun as early as 1936, with Warlok s Corpus Christi, also went from strength to strength, and ompany produer John Culshaw, a long-standing hampion of the duo on reord, was in harge of three of the four sets of sessions that yielded these reordings: only the Marh 1954 taping of nine folksong arrangements was overseen by James Walker. The Land of Lost Content was the title that the omposer John Ireland hose to give his 1921 yle of six songs from Housman s olletion A Shropshire Lad, using a quotation from one poem not set, Into my heart an air that kills. Housman s olletion, set in an imagined rural ounty and shot through with youthful melanholy, struk a profound hord in the England of his day, and inspired settings by numerous omposers in the upsurge in English song-writing at the beginning of the twentieth entury. The most famous of these are Vaughan Williams, with his yle On Wenlok Edge, and Butterworth, who not only made two olletions of Housman settings, but also omposed an orhestral rhapsody on one of his song-settings, straightforwardly entitled A Shropshire Lad. Both Butterworth and Vaughan Williams set Housman s Is my team ploughing, a dialogue between a living farmer and the dead friend he has supplanted; in his reording of the Butterworth heard here, Pears displays all his artistry in onjuring up the two haraters. When Pears and Britten ompiled their programs for reitals, broadasts and ultimately reordings, as well as exploring sixteenth and seventeenthentury English musi, they drew extensively on the early twentieth entury shool of songwriting. The program for an early reital at the

8 PHOTO: TULLY POTTER COLLECTION se th fo A in 1 F G a tr th in Peter Pears F p p e m re h w G re K n

9 PHOTO: TULLY POTTER COLLECTION seond Aldeburgh Festival, in 1949, for instane, ontains a number of the piees that make up the entral part of the seond CD in this olletion, reorded in 1955, and released the following year on a 10-inh LP under the title An Anthology of English Song, Vol. 3. These inluded three of the Five Chinese Lyris of 1949 by Britten s only pupil Arthur Oldham (later elebrated as the founder of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus), Frank Bridge s Tennyson setting, Go not, happy day, and Love went a-riding and Holst s Persephone, one of a 1929 olletion of settings of poetry by the writer and translator Humbert Wolfe, whose distane from the Housman ult, inidentally, an be measured in his sly parody of it. Frederik Delius s deliate setting of 17th-entury poet Robert Herrik s To Daffodils from 1915, part of a set of Four Old English Lyris, enapsulates the omposer s relaxed hromati manner, and the younger Ernest Moeran equally reahes bak in time, to Elizabethan England, for his spirited Merry Month of May of 1925 on words from dramatist Thomas Dekker. Pery Grainger s pioneering work in making field reordings of folksong in the first deade of the entury (at almost the same time as Bartók and Kodály were setting out to do the same in their native Hungary) produed the material for many arrangements, inluding the 1908 version of Bold William Taylor heard here. Pears met Grainger in the US in 1949, and found him a man of enormous harm and, I think, enormous gift. The Duth-born Bernard van Dieren s assoiations with London s post-world War I s avant-garde and ionolasti, at times revisionist views make an intriguing mixture. As osmopolitan as Delius in the poets he set (Keats, Joye, Hugo, Heine), he looked to the English past, to Shakespeare and the Vitorian poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, for the two 1925 settings heard here. Both Delius and Van Dieren had a major influene on the areer and musial thinking of one Philip Heseltine: Delius beame a personal friend after a meeting in 1911, and on disovering Van Dieren s musi, Heseltine wrote an essay on the Duth omposer whih he signed with the pseudonym Peter Warlok. In the immediate aftermath of that disovery, the omposer we now know as Warlok wrote a set of three songs under the title Saudades, inluding the probing Along the Stream, of 1917, a setting of an English translation of words by the eighth-entury Chinese Taoist poet Li Tai Po. The brief Piggesnie, from five years later, has a disarming, diret heerfulness, that mathes something of the omposer s

10 PHOTO: TULLY POTTER COLLECTION n a n a a s o A o f Y Jo M M a Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten T th d st a D B in

11 PHOTO: TULLY POTTER COLLECTION nonhalant reputation, if not the dissolution and drunkenness for whih he was later notorious, and whih earned him a ameo appearane in D.H. Lawrene s Women in Love as the louhe omposer Halliday. Warlok s farsighted hampioning of Bartók at the beginning of the 1920s played a part in the Hungarian omposer s first post-war onert tour of Britain. At the same time, Warlok was pursuing his own work on found if not stritly speaking folk material, in his arrangement of the song Yarmouth Fair, a Norfolk tune by one John Drinkwater, taken down in the field by Moeran, and given new words by Warlok s Maori assoiate Hal Collins (otherwise known as Te Akau). The songs by William Bush all date from 1944, the year before the omposer s premature death. Bush made his name initially as a pianist, studying in Berlin with Wilhelm Bakhaus, among others, but subsequently took lasses in omposition in London, with John Ireland, Van Dieren and the young Alan Bush. The elaborate, himing piano aompaniment to the exuberant Blake setting The Ehoing Green reflets the omposer s keyboard skill, while the intriate intertwining of voie and piano in Come, o ome, my life s delight with its hromati sensitivity, also attests to Bush s gift for reating a polished miniature. Frank Bridge oupies a entral plae in the unfolding story of English musi in this period: not only assoiated with Warlok and Bush, and a friend of Moeran, his one omposition pupil was Britten himself. Bridge s distintive voie and expressive onfidene are immediately apparent in Tis but a week, a setting of a poem from Gerald Gould s 1906 olletion Lyris, but the last two songs heard here, So perverse of 1905 and Journey s End of twenty years later, demonstrate the distane travelled by the omposer, from an easy melodiousness to something far more searhing. The England of the 1950s and 60s that produed the last musi on the first dis may have been an entirely different plae from that known by Delius, Warlok and Bridge, but both Mihael Tippett and Alan Bush were born into that earlier ulture, and Shakespeare (for Tippett), Milton and Blake (for Bush) remain natural hoies of poetry. Tippett s radialism is evident in the three Songs for Ariel, omposed for a London prodution of The Tempest in 1962; Alan Bush, on the other hand, an oldshool British Communist, found material to math his politial stane in the Book of Isaiah, Milton (from the oration Against the Sholasti

12 Philosophy ) and Blake. Together with a final setting of words from My song is for all men by fellow-communist sholar, ativist and poet, the Barbados-born Peter Blakman, Bush ompiled the antata Voies of Prophets, whih he dediated to Pears, and was first performed by the singer in Britten himself had an ambivalent relationship with that land of lost ontent and its note of late-vitorian nostalgia: not only does his hoie of poets range more widely than some of the English song-omposers who preeded him, but he onsidered himself musially distaned from the two towering figures of Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Most intriguingly, when he does approah a rural past, in the many well-known folksong settings, he does so with purely musial values to the forefront, and the intention is more to reate a viable art-song from the material than either evoke the regretful world of Housman or preserve an unearthed folk gem. Thus, the traditional tune of Down by the Salley Gardens has words by Yeats, and The Bonny Earl o Moray is no folksong, but a late- Vitorian omposed tune. Intriguingly, too, these first settings were made during the omposer s wartime stay in the United States, when he was separated from their ultural roots. Most of the songs given here belong to the first volume of settings, published in 1942; three ( The Miller of Dee, Sweet Polly Oliver and There s none to soothe ) were published in the third volume, in The only piee of original Britten in this olletion is the first song of his Auden yle On This Island, of 1937, the keywords florid musi inspiring a bold, baroque-like manner in both the voal and piano lines. The first performane was given not by Pears, but by Sophie Wyss, the Swiss-born soprano who also premiered another Auden setting, the antata Our Hunting Fathers in 1936, and the Rimbaud yle Les Illuminations three years later. Lennox Berkeley ame into the irle of Pears and Britten in 1936, by whih time he was already an established omposer, and his lilting Herrik setting of 1933 (whih Pears and Britten performed at a Quaker harity onert in London in 1943), demonstrates his elegant, Franophile manner. Pears s repertoire extended far beyond Britten, and works he ommissioned from ontemporary omposers inlude the Cyle for Delamation by the South-Afrian-born Priaulx Rainier, a testing tour de fore for unaompanied voie. Rihard Rodney Bennett s dramati 1961 setting for voie and ello of the anonymous 17th-entury ballad Tom O Bedlam s Song was also written expressly for Pears, who introdued it to im H a o m in p a u D e th T R R R S 2 C E A B

13 f t s s it at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1963, and together with the Rainier piees it was immediately reorded for Dea. Heard here in his natural voal territory, Pears is able to display his partiular gifts to the full. The original reviews in Gramophone magazine made it lear what marked him out as an interpreter of English song: unrivalled at penetrating to the heart of every poem he sings, a model of sensitivity, marvellous intensity and understanding (in Rainier s settings of John Donne). Musiianship is, of ourse, a key element, in the voal performanes as muh as the aompaniments, from pianist Viola Tunnard, who worked losely with Britten in the 1960s, partiularly on the Churh Parables, and the omposer himself, and ellist Joan Dikson. But the use of the word poems is signifiant, for in this repertoire, as muh as in his greatly admired Shubert or Bah performanes, it is Pears s ability to put his musiality to the servie of the words that is most striking. The dramati element is never overlooked, whether in the expansive monodrama of Tom O Bedlam or the miniature narrative of the hilling Irish song Little Sir William, where Pears draws the listener inexorably into its Turn of the Srew-like maabre end. Kenneth Chalmers,,. s s Reording produers: John Culshaw (CD1, CD2: 10-25); James Walker (CD2: 1-9) Reording engineers: Gordon Parry (CD1: 1-11, 27-33); Kenneth Wilkinson (CD1: 12-26, CD2: 22-25) Reording loations: Dea Studios, West Hampstead, London, UK, Marh 1954 (CD2: 1-9), September/Otober 1955 (CD2: 10-21); Kingsway Hall, London, UK, Otober 1963 (CD1: 12-26, CD2: 22-25), Deember 1964 (CD1: 1-11, 27-33) Cover photograph: Peter Pears (photo: Tully Potter Colletion) Eloquene series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji Art diretion: Chilu Booklet editor: Brue Raggatt

14 GREAT VOICES On Eloq uene Régine Crespin in Reital Fisher-Dieskau sings Brahms & Shumann The Flagstad Reitals Vol. 1: Brahms, Shumann, Strauss, Sinding, Wolf The Flagstad Reitals Vol. 2 Sandinavian Songs The Flagstad Reitals Vol. 3 Wagner & Mahler The Flagstad Reitals Vol. 4 Songs for Sunday Kenneth MKellar sings Handel Birgit Nilsson sings Wagner La Nilsson

15 Peter Pears A Treasury of English Song Peter Pears The Dea Premieres Sylvia Sass The Dea Reitals The Art of Oda Slobodskaya Elisabeth Söderström The Russian Songbook Elisabeth Söderström A Chopin Songbook Joan Sutherland Bel Canto Arias Kiri Te Kanawa sings Mozart Galina Vishnevskaya sings Russian Songs

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