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I reviewed
the first volume in Dunelm’s series
devoted to John R Williamson’s Housman
settings quite recently. I’d been impressed
by a couple of such settings presented
in The Wagon of Life anthology
issued by the same company. Greater
experience has served only to support
my initial enthusiasm. Williamson’s
broadly traditional palette is enriched
by mild dissonances and his perception
of these lyrics’ complexity fully communicates
itself to the listener.
Take, for example,
Look not in my eyes, for fear.
The almost Ravelian opening piano statement
is rich with allusive expressivity and
it becomes progressively bejewelled
with delicacy – limpid but also, never
far away, strangely disquieting. The
ploughman also exhibits another
characteristic Williamson strength;
the immediate establishment of mood
and atmosphere. The rocking rhythm set
up by the piano anticipates the baritone’s
"trampling" and succeeds in
seemingly inhabiting the setting from
within. Similarly Keeping sheep by
moonlight – a vernacular phrase
for a hanging – begins with ominous
and increasingly desolate piano writing;
Williamson introduces bells tolls with
considerable subtlety and ends the setting
as it began, an arch of ever deepening
realisation at the end of which we survey
the emotions stirred, the life cruelly
ended. "The journey to take"
in White in the moon the long road
lies is conveyed through ascending
and descending piano lines; chordal
progressions are pregnant with meaning.
If I concentrate in these examples on
Williamson’s piano writing it’s not
because the lyric line is any way less
effective; rather that the accompanying
prefigures, sets up, sustains, fractures
and comments upon the lyric in ways
that are stimulating and complicated
– without being obscure for obscurity’s
sake.
When Williamson takes
on even so well known a lyric as Is
my team ploughing? He does so on
his own terms; the only vague reminiscence
to Vaughan Williams comes in the lightening
of the voice at certain points in the
last verse. Otherwise what emerges from
this performance is not a dialogue as
such – or if it is not one overemphasised
by the voices of the quick and the dead
– but almost an internalised questioning
of the soul. The postlude is particularly
moving.
Only very small passing
complaints; why does Nigel Shaw sing
"awree" for "awry"
in Young is the blood that yonder
– it makes no sense of the ABCBB
rhyme scheme. Part of the text of Keeping
sheep by moonlight has been lost
in the booklet. The recorded sound is
serviceable. Otherwise here is a composer
(and a convincing interpreter of his
own music, as is Shaw, whose musicality
makes up for any minor problems) who
has inhabited these poems with personal
and lasting illumination.
Jonathan Woolf
Nigel Shaw (baritone) 