Information
Composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams
- 9 English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachian Mountains
- 2 English Folk Songs for voice & violin
- A Selection of Collected Folk Songs, Vol. 1
Mary Bevan, soprano
Nicky Spence, tenor
Roderick Williams, baritone
Thomas Gould, violin
William Vann, piano
Date: 2021
Label: Albion
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Recorded at London’s Henry Wood Hall in June of last year, this is the second of four volumes from Albion Records containing Vaughan Williams’s complete published arrangements of folk songs in English for voice with instrumental accompaniment.
Published posthumously in 1967 – and most likely chosen by RVW for treatment in 1938 – the Nine English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachian Mountains were drawn from hundreds of specimens gathered by Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), Maud Karpeles (1885-1976) and the American folklorist Olive Dame Campbell (1882-1954) between 1916 and 1918 in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia. Many of the songs have their roots in northern England and southern Scotland, and a number of them – ‘The Lovers’ Tasks (The Elfin Knight)’ (reimagined by Simon & Garfunkel in 1966 as ‘Scarborough Fair’), ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’ and ‘Barbara Ellen’ – date all the way back to the 17th century. Particularly affecting is Mary Bevan’s delivery of ‘The House Carpenter (The Daemon Lover)’, while Roderick Williams and Nicky Spence join forces to bring both personable warmth and twinkling fun to ‘The Twelve Apostles (The Ten Commandments)’.
RVW supplied eight and Sharp the remaining 28 accompaniments that appeared in the anthology published in 1917 under the title of A Collection of English Folk Songs, Vol 1. Highlights here include Williams’s mellifluous renderings of ‘Down by the riverside’ and ‘The Painful Plough’, Bevan’s wholly disarming treatment of ‘I will give my love an apple’ and ‘The Female Highwayman (Silvy, Silvy)’, while Spence has a ball with ‘The Fox’ and concluding ‘Farmyard Song’ – a close cousin to ‘I bought me a cat’ (familiar to many from Copland’s Old American Songs), and where Bevan’s enthusiastic animal noises are a hoot!
Sandwiched between the two main offerings comes the Two English Folk Songs for voice and violin dating from around 1913, most sensitively handled by Spence and Thomas Gould; these have already appeared on an earlier Albion release entitled ‘Purer than Pearl’. Interesting to discover that RVW had serious misgivings about Cecil Sharp’s own published piano accompaniment for ‘Searching for Lambs’, which may explain why this diptych didn’t appear in print until 1935 (some 11 years after Sharp’s death).
I need merely add that William Vann’s stylish pianism is a delight throughout; John Francis’s knowledgeable booklet notes, too, are a tremendous asset. No need to tarry: this is something of a treat.
-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone
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Ralph Vaughan Williams (12 October 1872 – 26 August 1958) was an English composer. His compositional teachers included Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music in London, Max Bruch in Berlin, and Maurice Ravel in Paris. Vaughan Williams' works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
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