Songs by Britten, Finzi & Tippett

Those whose quest is exclusively musical will find this issue a great deal more rewarding. The music is not everyday fare for one thing. It varies in quality from moderately tolerable to startlingly brilliant in my own assessment, but it is all interesting at the very least. Just as interesting is the series of texts the music is set to, the best music in my own opinion going to the best words. The Tippett number is actually prose, a set of four sequences from the writings of the 19th-20th century naturalist William Henry Hudson under the collective title 'Boyhood's End'. A glance through Hudson's oeuvre doesn't suggest erotica in general - 'Seagulls in London' and 'The Famous Missions of California' are fairly representative titles. I must say, on the other hand, that the tone of the prose here, purportedly about an adolescent's awakening to nature, is more than a little febrile and it would be reasonable to suppose that more is meant than meets the eye. Finzi is represented by a 10-item song cycle to poems by Hardy, but the best poems (not counting those in German) are the 12 by the Scottish poet William Soutar (1898-1943) set dazzlingly to music by Britten. Soutar alternates between broad Scots and standard English. In the Scots numbers he recaptures for me the authentic tone of the old Scots ballads, the kind of poetry that Britten also set memorably in one piece from his serenade for tenor horn and strings. The plain-English poems are vivid protests against war taking its effects on children as their grisly theme, and the appeal of such poetry to Britten will surprise nobody. The concluding Britten numbers are actually settings of Hoelderlin, probably best known to English-speaking music lovers as the author of the problematical text of Brahms's Schicksalslied. In one of these poems, Socrates and Alcibiades, there is a remote and cold reference to admiration for the beauty of a youth, and that is as near as any text here comes to that theme.

There is a very interesting essay with the disc by Roger Vignoles himself. Obviously everything he says commands respect, but to me it suffers a little from Britishness - it's a kind of caucus-race with prizes for everyone, smoothing out the partiality shown by the Creator and anticipating the equality that only exists in the mortuary. The attempt to find a linking motif of the passage of time doesn't convince me either - you could link these texts with anyone's diaries on that basis or with any old work of history or chronicling. To my ears, what this essay doesn't point out is what is what I find glaringly obvious, namely that Britten is a great composer and the other two are not. The Britten numbers come last on the disc, and the contrast, for me, with the well-bred but weak-tea Finzi is mortifying. I'm not a great enthusiast for Hardy, but I can recognise his significance and I find it reproduced only fitfully in these settings. In particular the composer seems awkwardly aware of his own mildness, and in two or three cases cranks up great emphatic concluding fortes to texts that don't appear to call for anything of the kind. If you were reciting, for instance, 'Shortening Days' would you raise your voice and yell at the top of your lungs 'His mill and tubs and vat and press'? I'm quite sure you would sooner die than do anything so foolish, so why should a musician do so either?

The performances are in general excellent, and the recording is fine too. Padmore's Scottish pronunciation is slightly hit-and-miss, but I rather like his odd mezzo-tenor timbre. The artists show what seems to me real understanding and penetration of the music they are dealing with, and the intrinsic interest of having it collected together in this intelligent and sensitive way does not dispose me to be fault-finding.The word that sums up this disc is 'interesting', genuinely very interesting; and the Britten numbers are more than just that.