Silence & Music

C V Stanford: The Blue Bird | Edward Elgar: There is sweet music

Vaughan Williams: Silence and Music | Herbert Howells: The summer is coming

Percy Grainger: Brigg Fair | R Vaughan Williams: Bushes and Briars

R Vaughan Williams: The winter is gone | R Vaughan Williams: The Turtle Dove

James MacMillan: The Gallant Weaver | Jonathan Dove: Who killed Cock Robin?

Percy Grainger: The Three Ravens | Benjamin Britten: The Evening Primrose

Peter Warlock: All the flowers of the spring | Edward Elgar: Owls (An Epitaph)

R Vaughan Williams: Rest

Gabrieli Consort

Paul McCreesh (conductor)

This moving sequence explores that vast 20th century secular English choral repertoire which goes under the generic title ‘part-songs’. Buried amongst vast quantities of slightly twee pastoralism – the much-derided ‘cow-pat’ school – are to be found many settings of glorious poetry, forming a corpus of sublime madrigals at least as fine as their famous renaissance forebears. At the heart of these is the complex relationship between man and nature, the bitter-sweetness of a radiant and beautiful dawn creating the same unbearable sadness of a ravishing song, both with intimations of sublimity and mortality.

 

R Vaughan Williams: Rest