Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)
Songs Volume 2: To Send My Vessel Sailing On Beyond
Songs of Faith, Op.97 (1906)
A Child’s Garland of Songs, Op.30 (pub 1892)
Songs of a Roving Celt, Op.157 (1918)
[Four Patriotic Songs] (pub 1917-18)
A Carol of Bells (1915)
Elisabetta Paglia (mezzo-soprano)
Christopher Howell (piano)
rec. 2018/21, Studio of Griffa e Figli, Milan
No texts
DA VINCI CLASSICS C00608 [76]
This is the second volume in a series that began with last year’s inaugural release (review). Claims as to première status in recordings are notoriously provisional but Christopher Howell is precise in his own claims; as far as is known these are the first complete recordings of two cycles, A Child’s Garland of Songs and Songs of a Roving Celt, the first of the collection brought together under the title ‘Patriotic Songs’ and the first to be recorded of Songs of Faith but not the first to be issued – that responsibility fell to Roderick Williams and Andrew West on Somm CD0627. It looks as if Somm is entering the fray with its own Stanford song series.
Songs of Faith takes three Tennyson and three Whitman settings but Stanford doesn’t seem to respond to the texts with equal fervour or complexity. Tennyson’s God and the Universe draws from him a more complicated, even ambivalent response, expressively rich and deeply satisfying, whilst Whitman’s To the Soul offers the pianist powerful opportunities to embody the music’s stirring intensity and for the mezzo to explore a vocal line both varied and imaginative. Questions of faith and mystical elements are the motors of these poems and of Stanford’s settings.
A much earlier collection was A Child’s Garland of Songs which sets poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s book of the same name (bar the final word, which was ‘Verse’: however, the poet wrote a dedication, a prefatory poem, for Stanford’s published selection, as Howell explains in his notes). They were dedicated to the composer’s two children and are Victorian postcards, brief, pithy, genial. The Pirate Story is catchy, there’s a quotation from The British Grenadiers in Marching Song and much brio and vitality, excellently conveyed by Elisabetta Paglia and Howell, in the concluding My Ship and Me. The most grave-sounding setting is Foreign Children.
A more outgoing, yet troubling set is Songs of a Roving Celt, which dates from the last year of the First War. Murdoch Maclean’s poems had been written in 1916 and it’s certainly not difficult to understand their appeal – a Scot returns to his homeland lamenting his dead companion – in the year of the Battle of the Somme. It would be too literal-minded - and anatomically impossible, of course – to ask for a male singer but the only recordings I know from this set is of The Pibroch, which was sung by Roy Henderson, with Ivor Newton, on a 1942 Decca 78, and by Stephen Varcoe and Clifford Benson for Hyperion. The singer’s bravado seems to falter and dissolve as the setting develops. Elsewhere the music reflects pensive melancholy only temporarily banished by the onrushing pianism of No More before the final setting’s reflective introspection re-establishes the prevailing mood of lament and loss.
Of the four songs that have been gathered here – though not by Stanford – as ‘Four Patriotic Songs’, three are not especially distinguished melodically but Wales for Ever is much more outgoing and happily sweeping. A Carol of Bells was once recorded, as Christopher Howell notes, by Gervase Elwes with pianist F.B Kiddle and Paglia dispatches it with stentorian Edna Thornton-esque brio.
There are no texts in the booklet but you’ll find them on
www.lieder.net
The standards established in the first volume are happily maintained here.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: John France (October 2022)
Published: November 4, 2022
