Gurney: Songs [CD]

The recording is clear and the singer faithful to the poetry although I always imagined Gurneys' songs being sung by a male singer. Its good to see some new previously unrecorded songs although there are still many songs in the collection that have been previously recorded. Maybe they are not considered to have been of merit....or maybe there will be a second volume in the series.

This disc deserves every star that a reviewer can award for the quality of the music making and the recording, and for the sheer enterprise and imagination that the production shows. However before getting round to all that I need to clear up some oddities. My disc is identical with the product on offer here except in two particulars: the series number on mine is 19, not 17; and mine has 30 tracks not 26, the difference being accounted for by having separate tracks for each of the 5 Elizabethan songs.

Ivor Gurney died in a mental institution aged 47, but the general tone of the songs is very upbeat, most of the music being in major keys. How well major tonality expresses the sentiments of the 30 poems is something you can assess easily in half of them, but only with some effort in the others as the texts are not printed but substituted with a stony `Text in copyright'. This embargo is applied to Masefield, de la Mare, Belloc and a few other less known bards of the composer's era, but not to all. Edward Thomas, a fatality of the WWI trenches, is allowed his say, but for the most part the texts we are allowed to read are Shakespeare and other 16th/17th century songsters, even including the Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee oddity that many remember from the first couple of pages of Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

The performers do a splendid job, and the recorded tone is absolutely as it should be. The issue (whatever its true series-number) is from the Naxos `English Song Series', and it may be that British artists are naturally endowed with special affection (I would not claim special insight) for music of this kind. Myself, I admit that I find it rather insipid. It was yesterday's music on the day it was written, but it shows what might be called English good taste and maybe even some degree of genuine inspiration. Music in England was well behind the European curve generally, but if the composer was a true giant like Elgar this did not matter; and even England could show a really individual innovator in Delius. Gurney was no Delius and no Elgar, but I am grateful to Susan Bickley and Iain Burnside, but most of all to Naxos, for filling a gap in my education. Susan Bickley's tone is fresh and pleasing, and when she has to put real power into the vocal line, as in By a Bierside, her forte is unforced and imposing. Iain Burnside handles the piano part with tact and urbanity, and the balance is as I like it, with neither the singer too forward nor the piano unduly reticent.

However it is to Naxos that most of the credit is due, and it is not the first time nor probably the tenth that I have had to say this. At a time of economic downturn generally, coming on top of what has been supposedly a hard time for classical recording, Naxos have continued to provide the musical community with a steady succession of imaginative and high-quality releases at modest cost. I have said what the situation is with the texts. The liner note provides some commentary, but it could have used its space better by providing missing detail about what each suppressed poem is saying rather than going in for restrained raptures such as `Its conclusion...is truly magnificent'. We should decide that kind of thing for ourselves, surely, but whatever we do or don't find magnificent about any of the music, what should be saluted is the spirit of enterprise behind the whole production.