An Englishman, after all, could not have written the Eroica or the Ode to Joy. So what was he writing in those years of Deutsche Romantik? What was England's saltiness and phlegm—to say nothing of its mobile and volatile musical scene—contributing to it all? This disc offers some fascinating indications, and insights enough to inspire yet another volume of English Music from a novelist like Peter Ackroyd...
There is, for example, Samuel Wesley's Chatterton madrigal O sing unto mie roundelaie, and the equally calculating archaism of William Linley's Down in the gleamy vale, both of them well-suited to the light male voices and all but blanched sopranos chosen for this twenty-seventh volume of ''The English Orpheus''. Pinto's The Distress'd Mother is, perhaps, the very epitome of English musical romanticism. The collision of realism and sentiment make for a peculiarly English pathos: this is to Schubert what Dickens is to Stifter.
There are glees, serenades and Scottish ballads aplenty for convivial part-singing and sociable public or private concerts. For songs like Storace's Captivity, a ballad of sympathy for the imprisoned Marie-Antoinette, I find Ana-Maria Rincon's soprano just too undernourished. And glees like Stafford Smith's pompous Blest pair of sirens (looking back to Handel, forward to Parry) could also do with more robust, less precious performances.
The instrumental pieces (including Meyer's delightful musical-box of a Duet on Scottish Airs for the 1817 Broadwood and 1808 single-action harp used here) work well. But the real discovery of the recital is the music of Samuel Webbe the younger, a humble church organist by all accounts, whose Funeral march in honour of Beethoven and two songs show that, for one English composer at least, music was indeed not too serious to be taken seriously.'