RaLPh Vaughan Williams: Kissing Her Hair (Early Songs)

Sarah Fox, Andrew Staples, Roderick Williams, Iain Burnside

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Cat No: ALB002

Release Date: 10 June 2008

Label: Albion Records

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 5060158190027

Genres: Classical Chamber Music

Description

Albion's second recording, from Potton Hall in 2007, is of early songs by Vaughan Williams, including four world premières. Performers are Roderick Williams, Iain Burnside, Sarah Fox and Andrew Staples.

Vaughan Williams was widely read, and strongly drawn to Shakespeare and poets including Walt Whitman and Elizabethan poets including Robert Herrick. He was obsessed with finding 'settable' poems. He composed over 100 songs in total and would often turn to song to express deep emotions. The twenty songs on this CD were composed over 30 years and demonstrate in the early songs of 1895 and 1896 a remarkable assurance. They show that Vaughan Williams was aware of the beauty and musical quality of lyric poetry in his early twenties and had the technical ability to successfully match words to music.

Sarah Fox studied Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, and singing at the Royal College of Music. She won the 1997 Kathleen Ferrier Award and the 2000 John Christie Award. Andrew Staples is considered by many to be one of the most versatile British singers. In addition, he is an experienced opera director, and is increasingly in demand as a portrait photographer. Roderick Williams OBE encompasses a wide repertoire, from baroque to contemporary music. He won the Singer of the Year Award in the 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. He is also a composer and has had works premiered at the Wigmore and Barbican Halls, the Purcell Room and live on national radio.

Iain Burnside is a Scottish classical pianist and accompanist, and a former presenter on BBC Radio 3. Following study at Merton College, Oxford, the Royal Academy of Music and the Chopin Academy, in Warsaw he became a freelance pianist, specialising particularly in song repertoire. He has written a musical play A Soldier and a Maker on the life of Ivor Gurney, premiered in 2012.

Some of these artists also feature on ALB001 Vaughan Williams: The Sky shall be our Roof, ALBCD013 Vaughan Williams: On Christmas Day, ALBCD015 Vaughan Williams: The Sons of the Morning, ALBCD018 Vaughan Williams: Stars of the Night and ALBCD028 Vaughan Williams: Discoveries.

Reviews

Another pleasing clutch of RVW songs
This second volume of Vaughan Williams's songs from the RVW Society fully matches the artistic and technical excellence of its predecessor (an Editor's Choice in March). The programme runs in chronological order and spans three decades, from the July 1895 setting of Robert Herrick's "To Daffodils" (a strikingly confident effort from the end of VW's student days) up to 1925 and the economical and searching Three Poems by Walt Whitman. Other plums include the delightful "Orpheus with his Lute", "The sky above the roof" (so raptly responsive to Verlaine's imagery) and the expansive treatment of Tennyson's "Tears, idle tears". There's also a first recording for the unpublished setting of Swinburne's "Rondel" that VW wrote in the first year of his second stint at the RCM.
Soprano Sarah Fox and tenor Andrew Staples contribute freshly, but it's that fine baritone Roderick Williams who has by far the lion's share of duties. He is entrusted with all but five of these 20 songs – and a sterling job he does, too, with intelligent word-pointing and the voice sonorous, firmly focused and evenly controlled. … An hour's worth of pretty much unbridled pleasure – and I need only add that Iain Burnside provides immaculate support. --Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone Magazine, September 2008

…a real discovery … heard in full mastery…-- Rob Barnett, Musicweb International
Tracklisting