Most Grand to Die - Songs by George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams / Ja

Album Summary
Notes & Reviews
Also Purchased
Works Details

Album Summary

Butterworth, George : Bredon Hill and Other Songs, songs (5) for voice & piano

Gurney, Ivor : In Flanders for voice & piano

Gurney, Ivor : Severn Meadows for voice & piano

Gurney, Ivor : Even Such is Time, for voice & piano

Gurney, Ivor : By a Bierside

Butterworth, George : Songs (6) from "A Shropshire Lad", for voice & piano (or orchestra)

Gurney, Ivor : The Twa Corbies, for voice & piano

Vaughan Williams, Ralph : Songs of Travel, song cycle for voice & piano (or orchestra)

Gurney, Ivor : Sleep, for voice & piano

Performers

Eugene Asti (Piano)
James Rutherford (Baritone)

Composers

Notes & Reviews:

The First World War marked an entire generation of composers, both in England and on the continent. Of the three composers represented here, George Butterworth was killed on the Somme in 1916, while Ralph Vaughan Williams, who damaged his hearing while commanding an artillery battery, survived, but with memories that would color many of his post-war masterpieces. Ivor Gurney, finally, also survived, but with a seriously aggravated bipolar disorder that would lead to his spending the last 15 years of his life in a mental hospital. While Butterworth composed his two song cycles some five years before the outbreak of the war, the collection of poems that he chose his texts from - A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad - was striking a resonant contemporary note with its numerous poems dealing with ill-starred young men facing death. Even earlier, in 1904, Vaughan Williams had turned to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, for his Songs of Travel, a set of nine songs in which the wanderer-narrator philosophically accepts the mixture of joys and sorrows that are offered to him along the road. Gurney - the youngest of the three composers - was also a poet, and in Severn Meadows expressed his longing for home in both text and music. Along with In Flanders, Even such is time and By a bierside - ending with the words of the album's title - Severn Meadows was composed during Gurney's time in the trenches, before exposure to poison gas in September 1917 caused him to be returned to England. Interpreting these highly expressive songs is James Rutherford, who has risen to fame as a Wagnerian singer, with Hans Sachs (Die Meistersinger) at Bayreuth among his credentials, but who reserves a special place in his repertoire for English 20th-century song. On his first recording for BIS he appears with his regular collaborator Eugene Asti at the piano.

BBC Music Magazine, December 2012
A hefty bass-baritone in every sense, he's inevitably compared with Bryn Terfel, but his voice seems darker and somewhat smoother, less given to pianissimi but still expressive...Songs of Travel has a notably virile energy, reinforced by veteran accompanist Eugene Asti's unusually driven reading...A very worthwhile recital.

International Record Review, September 2012
Rutherford's full tone, dark, possibly bass-baritone rather than BIS's designation of baritone, is released with the vigour to resemble somebody, here the vagabond, striding purposefully along the lane...Asti's playing gels with Rutherford's singing in these Gurney songs, as it does in the other pieces...Rutherford's enunciation is all one could wish for.

The Guardian, 15th August 2012
The quality of the Gurney songs may be a bit uneven, but Rutherford handles them all with great tact, his tone fined down, his diction immaculate, and without a hint of extraneous pathos. In the authentically great Butterworth sets Rutherford's approach is exemplary.

Gramophone Magazine, November 2012
Rutherford brings his Wagnerian bass-baritone to bear on the song repertoire with uncommon skill and sensitivity...The only serious drawback comes at the top of the voice, where Wagnerian bluster and a slow vibrato sometimes detract from the beauty of his singing...but Rutherford has given notice of a very appreciable talent for song. With accompaniments of exemplary precision, this disc is highly recommended.

American Record Guide, January/February 2013
I had to live with just one, this performance is deeply engaging and comes to a deeply affecting conclusion as Rutherford reduces his voice to a vibrato-free hush on the final line "And I lived and loved, and closed the door." It is completely captivating and sets the stage perfectly for Gurney's 'Sleep', which ends the program. Rutherford's rapturous singing of the beautiful long lines brings you magically into the night of those "that suffer long" who may in sleep "know some little joy".

Reviews

There are currently no reviews, be the first one!

Also Purchased

Works Details