Today we have three more leading English singers in notable Vaughan Williams performances - Astra Desmond, Roy Henderson and Heddle Nash. Also included is the first recording of the composer's "Serenade to Music," as led by its dedicatee, Sir Henry Wood, and sung by 16 famous artists of the era, including Desmond, Henderson and Nash.
The earliest solo work on the program is Desmond's performance of "Linden Lea," dating from 1941 and accompanied by the ubiquitous and always welcome Gerald Moore. As with all these singers, Desmond (1893-1973) was identified with the composer's music. Vaughan Williams had dedicated his Magnificat to the contralto in 1932.
Next are two 1944 recordings from one of the leading baritones of the era, Roy Henderson (1899-2000), who has appeared on my other site in George Butterworth's "Shropshire Lad" settings. Henderson performs "Silent Noon" and "Orpheus with His Lute," a setting of a passage from Shakespeare's Henry VIII. As with the "Serenade to Music," we have one of the author's remarkable odes to the power of music. Henderson's accompanist is Eric Gritton.
Finally we come to perhaps the leading English tenor of the time, Heddle Nash (1894-1961). His 1952 recordings include "Silent Noon" and "The Vagabond." The latter is best-known piece in Vaughan Williams's settings of Robert Lewis Stevenson, Songs of Travel. Here, as with many of the composer's works, he has chosen poems with a solitary protagonist who is seeking to become one with the natural world: "Wealth I seek not, hope nor love, / Nor a friend to know me; / All I seek, the heaven above, / And the road below me." Again, Gerald Moore is the accompanist.
The "Serenade to Music," with a text adapted from a passage in The Merchant of Venice, is one of Vaughan Williams' most beautiful and best loved compositions. He wrote the work for Henry Wood on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his first conducting engagement. In the score, Vaughan Williams indicated solo passages for 16 leading vocalists of the day: sopranos Isobel Baillie, Lilian Stiles-Allen, Elsie Suddaby and Eva Turner, contraltos Muriel Brunskill, Astra Desmond, Mary Jarred and Margaret Balfour, tenors Heddle Nash, Frank Titterton, Walter Widdop and Parry Jones, baritones Roy Henderson and Harold Williams, and basses Robert Easton and Norman Allin.
Sir Henry led the first performance on October 5, 1938, and recorded the work with the 16 soloists and the BBC Symphony 10 days later.
In addition to song texts, the download includes a table detailing the solo passages in the "Serenade to Music." The songs were remastered from files on the site of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. The source of the "Serenade to Music" was a circa 1980s reissue as reworked by me. The resulting sound is very good.
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| Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Henry Wood |
12 comments:
Link (Apple lossless):
https://mega.nz/#!eYEhGADS!A1ioANiqOCte3IvnZq7EN--7RDhTr87AjZOcg60skAU
you are starting to edify me in spite of myself.
Buster's Edifying Singles
Wow! So I always thought the practice of having a dozen singers share a single song started with We Are The World or Do They Know It's Christmas, but it apparently goes back a lot further than I realized! Thanks, Buster.
Yes, it was a novel idea. He later did an arrangement for four soloists and choir.
Lovely. When Philharmonic Hall (as it was then) opened in New York, Bernstein led this piece in the opening night concert. I attended the dress rehearsal on the previous night. I had never heard the piece before and I always enjoy hearing it again. Thank you.
Eric - That must have been quite an occasion!
Van Cliburn made what I believe was his only recording as a conductor leading Serenade to Music with four soloists and the Interlochen Youth Orchestra.
I have an unfortunate tendency to remember vivid (but useless) events and forget the location of my house keys and I remember that recording was thoroughly trashed by a radio panel on WQXR. I think it was Irving Kolodin who called it "pretentious boo," and that phrase stuck in my memory.
As I only heard it on AM radio thanks to nighttime reception hundreds of miles from NYC, I can't remember or testify to anything about the recording.
Our British friends admire Heddle Nash greatly, referring to him as "The English Bjoerling." That seems to me a stretch and a half. You only have to compare him in the 4th Act of Bohème conducted by Beecham and the similarly-paced post-war complete version with Bjoerling to hear the difference.
And I am no admirer of his Ferrando in the Glyndebourne Cosi fan tutte. He sounds like a man with a bad head cold and vastly preferable recordings were made by, well, everybody.
He may have sounded better in English material but his most celebrated record is of "The Dream of Gerontius" and I can't make head or tail of "Gerontius."
Anyway, thanks for this. The twelve singers sound fine, though it would take an expert to tell who is who and Sir Henry was a fine conductor.
The whole concert was issued by Columbia at the time. I'm not sure if it is still in print as a concert but the Serenade, at least, is available. Twelve singers: Donald Bell, Ezio Flagello, George London, Jennie Tourel, Lili Chookasian, Shirley Verrett, Adele Addison, Eileen Farrell, Lucine Amara, Charles Bressler, Jon Vickers, Richard Tucker. Holy cats!
I don't think I've ever heard the Cliburn version, although I can picture the cover for some reason. Did Kolodin think the work was pretentious or just Cliburn's reading of it? I wonder if he thought that Shakespeare was pretentious with all that fancy language and such.
I agree that Nash is overpraised, although I like him. Gerontius is one of my favorite works. I think it helps to have been raised in a fairly religious milieu many years ago - actually closer in time to Newman's world than the present day. I transferred Sargent's second recording of Gerontius many years ago.
One of the reasons I included that scorecard for the singers in the Serenade is that it's impossible (to me) to tell the tenors apart, one after the other.
Charlot - That's another one that I've not heard. My favorite is the Boult recording with Sheila Armstrong et al, probably because it was the first I heard.
I really can't remember anything but that phrase. (And it may not even have been Kolodin but another panelist who said it. It was a looooong time ago.)
It is possible that Cliburn, who was not really a conductor, of course, leading an amateur chorus with amateur soloists (however gifted, hey, getting to Interlochen at all is an achievement) may not have projected the composition to its best advantage.
I haven't heard it very often but it has never struck me as pretentious or as boo, whatever that may be.
You certainly have a better base of cultural reference for Gerontius than I do. Out of respect for the composer, I keep coming back to it and maybe I'll figure it out one day, after all. There were some live excerpts under Elgar's own baton that lead me to believe that might happen. The under-recorded Malcolm McEachern was involved, if memory serves.
Major A&R frustration: There were attempts to record the whole of Gerontius with Elgar conducting and John McCormack. Didn't happen.
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