Produced to celebrate
the centenary of Thomas Pitfield’s birth,
in 2003, this is a showcase for the
North West Composers’ Association. From
a tough childhood Pitfield was self-taught
as a draughtsman, poet and essentially
as a pianist and composer as well. He
seemed to feed on art and craft as surely
as petals open to the sun. There’s little
of his work currently in the catalogue
but admirers cling tenaciously to the
Royal Northern College of Music disc,
issued a decade ago to welcome his 90th
birthday. That gave us his excellent
First Violin Sonata and various songs
and other chamber pieces – none duplicates
the three songs on this new disc.
We do get a rather
appropriately Russian-sounding setting
of Pushkin in the song that gives this
disc its title as well as a spare, elliptical
By the Dee at Night – all portent and
Pitfield uneasiness. The other composers
write in a tonal idiom, sensitive to
word-setting in the best tradition,
and respond alertly. Stuart Scott’s
setting of Pitfield’s own poem, Alderley,
sounds like updated Finzi when in robust
Hardyesque mood. Night Clouds has a
fount of jaunty rhythm to propel Amy
Lowell’s evocative words. Geoffrey Kimpton
manages to evoke the subtlest of railway
rhythms in Faintheart in a Railway Station
(a Hardy setting and a clever one to
choose), the words "radiant stranger"
met with ascending chords of wonder.
Joanna Treasure sets her own father’s
Tango, the funniest and most outspokenly
witty setting of the disc, with its
tango sway leading or doubling the lyric
line. Then there’s John R Williamson
who sets Housman’s The Recruit and manages
to insinuate a fractured See the Conqu’ring
Hero quotation in anticipation of the
very lines – its effect is undercutting,
all-seeing, a bleak Hardyesque vision
of Housman. He also adds mild dissonance.
He sets two more Housman lyrics and
in Think No More, Lad the piano part
heavily comments, with unambiguous independence
and mordancy, on the lyric’s heartiness.
Let’s have an album of Williamson’s
Housman – he strikes a powerful, troublesome
note and he makes one think. Stephen
Wilkinson goes from the poetic extremes
of Marvell to MacNeice and does justice
to both, no mean feat – in the former
he’s fast moving with a delicious little
melisma along the way. Philip Wood takes
on the challenge of Now sleeps the Crimson
Petal and meets it with austere romanticism
whilst Sasha Johnson Manning’s two Psalm
settings are variously limpid and proudly
propulsive. Is it coincidence or does
Kevin George Brown hint at the Moonlight
Sonata in his setting of Larkin’s Dying
Day? David Golightly sets nature poems
by Steve Hobson – spare and elliptical,
with After the Kill full of precision
in the writing and flurries of movement.
We end with David Forshaw whose Horse
is splendidly drama-fuelled and imperious.
Baritone Mark Rowlinson
has quite some ground to cover here;
he comes under strain in some settings,
especially at the top of the compass
but digs into the half head voice of
Golightly’s Puffin and meets many of
the challenges with great understanding.
Peter Lawson is the unruffled pianist
– if there is any ruffling in the piano
part he keeps it securely inaudible.
Jonathan Woolf
Mark Rowlinson (baritone) 