English song has been well looked after recently by artists and record companies, and it could be that readers who have invested in, for example, the two volumes so far published of ‘A Century of English Song’ (listed above) with Sarah Leonard as principal singer and the admirable Malcolm Martineau as pianist (there as here) will feel that enough is enough, especially as there are inevitable duplications. If so, let me try to persuade them otherwise.
Certainly having heard these earlier records didn’t stop me enjoying this one. Being personal again (though it would be interesting to compare with the experience of other listeners), I would say that, after a mildly pleased but disengaged response, involvement began at the eighth song, Ivor Gurney’s setting of John Fletcher’s poem Sleep, with its sudden impassioned rise (so different from Warlock’s marvellous but more confined, angst-ridden version) at ‘Oh, let my joys have some abiding’. From this, on into Howells’ King David – where one feels the singer newly touched by the strange beauty of words and music. Then Vaughan Williams’ Silent Noon, with the joy of experiencing, almost as though again for the first time, the loveliness of its modulations. Then, shortly after this, come some surprises: Warlock’s Lillygay, shorn (wisely) of its last number, ‘Rantum Tantum’, and some musical pastiches, words by Edward Lear, music attributed to one ‘Karel Drofnatzski’, which (Jeremy Dibble’s excellent notes enlighten us) is an anagram, with East European flourishes, of Stanford.
The programme is delightful, and so are the performances. In an introductory note, Lynne Dawson says that the choice of songs was her own. Lucky thing, you might say, to have the opportunity (and typical that Hyperion should have provided it). But I can’t think of a more deserving singer: in a world where justice prevailed it would be her singing of Verdi’s ‘Requiem aeternam’ that would be the best remembered musical contribution to the funeral service of Princess Diana, and she would be renowned the world over for it