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 |
