A favorite long-playing record appears on compact disc, expanded
with extras.
No
composer ever had his finger more on the pulse of English folk
music than the great Ralph Vaughan Williams. His arrangements
of folk songs for unaccompanied chorus are not to be missed.
Some are well-known, others were gathered in countryside expeditions
by researchers, including RVW himself, who collected the first
song here, “Bushes and Briars,” from Charles Pottipher in Essex in 1903.
RVW
had an uncanny ability to identify what was haunting and powerful
in these old tunes and intensify that in his arrangements for
vocal ensembles. Thus, however easily my jaded ear might shrug
off the well-worn melody to “Loch Lomond,” put RVW’s harmonization in front
of me and I’m reduced to jelly by the third verse. Not only
are the composer’s harmonies potent, he extracts dominant melodic
motifs and builds introductions, accompaniments and codas out
of them. For instance, the aforementioned “Bushes and Briars”
is a fine, though fairly standard lost love ballad. Yet RVW
conjures the ghosts out of it in his forlorn arrangement, with
displaced accents and archaic parallel fifths.
“Greensleeves”
fascinated RVW, leading to an orchestral fantasia that is very
famous. His vocal arrangement, however, is even better. Though
the orchestral piece contains similar gestures, here the emphasis
is on the romantic loss, kept flexibly flowing in Christopher
Bishop’s direction. “The Unquiet Grave” is a wrenching tale
of love pushed to disturbing ends, with RVW’s arrangement for
female voices harmonically illustrating the song’s unearthly
tale. “John Dory” becomes an intricate vocal scherzo, scampering
in mischievous counterpoint. And so it continues for 18 songs,
including the “Five English Folk Songs” set, which dates from
1913 and boasts even more intricate arrangements.
The
London Madrigal Singers were evidently an expert group, including
the great Ian Partridge on some of the tenor solos - Yes, Mr.
Bostridge was not the first great tenor named Ian to hail from
the British Isles! The singing is throughout both balanced and nuanced, led with both
crispness and flexibility by Bishop. The recording from Kingsway
Hall is simply lovely, restored here beautifully, improving
the balance between high and low voices when compared to the
original American release on LP, which was on the bargain label
Seraphim with the songs curiously in a different order. Surprisingly,
despite my familiarity with the Seraphim release, I was able
to recognize the superiority of the current ordering, which
is arranged with contrast in mind, whereas the LP seems to have
been rearranged with the most familiar titles to the beginnings
of each side. Astonishingly, these works aren’t recorded all
that frequently, so there isn’t much competition for this release,
which every Vaughan Williams fan should hear.
The
by no means negligible bonus on this reissue is a half-hour’s
worth of part songs by Gustav Holst for male voices, including
both folksong arrangements and original works, from a 1974 recording
by the Baccholian Singers of London, a group again including
Ian Partridge, as well as other familiar names such as Rogers
Covey-Crump and John Huw Davies. Original pieces include the
comical “The Homecoming,” setting a text — alas, not included
here — by Thomas Hardy, and the “Hymn to Manas” from the fourth
group of Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda. Particularly
unsettling is the brief but potent “David’s Lament for Jonathan,”
a canon which sinks lower and lower as it goes. Five of the
Six Choral Folk Songs, H136, are included, giving us
a glimpse at Holst’s more pedagogical approach to setting folksongs.
The
sound of the Holst selections, from EMI’s Abbey Road Studio
No. 1 is not as limpid and clear as the sound from Kingsway,
but the space is effectively used, with the voices closer to
the microphones, but with plenty of resonance allowed to resound
in the background.
The
only complaint I could possibly make about this essential collection
is the lack of texts. If EMI’s budget strategy were one of maximum
efficiency, I’d shut up, but the current booklet contains one
blank page, a mini catalogue of other titles in the “British Composers”
series, including a full title page and mostly blank back page,
and full-page pictures of the two composers. Assuming that most
listeners would be able to look up pictures of the composer/arrangers
on Wikipedia; couldn’t those seven wasted pages have been used
instead for the texts? Even for English speakers, some of the
folk songs here have hard-to-discern words in obscure dialects,
and the powerful texts, polished by time, are the starting points
for appreciation of these gems. At any rate, my old record of
the RVW arrangements has been worn nearly smooth by replaying,
so I’m delighted to see this reissue appear.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
