Silence & Music
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Label: Signum
Cat No: SIGCD490
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Vocal/Choral
Release Date: 6th October 2017
Contents
Works
Flower Songs (5), op.47Part-Songs (4), op.53
The Three Ravens
The Summer is Coming
The Gallant Weaver
Partsongs (8), op.119
Rest
Silence and Music
The Turtle Dove (traditional)
The Winter is Gone
Dirges of Webster (3)
Artists
Gabrieli ConsortConductor
Paul McCreeshWorks
Flower Songs (5), op.47Part-Songs (4), op.53
The Three Ravens
The Summer is Coming
The Gallant Weaver
Partsongs (8), op.119
Rest
Silence and Music
The Turtle Dove (traditional)
The Winter is Gone
Dirges of Webster (3)
Artists
Gabrieli ConsortConductor
Paul McCreeshAbout
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Stanford - Eight Part Songs, Op. 119: No. 3, The Blue Bird
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2Elgar - 4 Part Songs, Op. 53: No. 1, There Is Sweet Music
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3Vaughan Williams - Silence And Music
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4Howells - The Summer Is Coming
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5Grainger - Brigg Fair
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6Vaughan Williams - Bushes And Briars
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7Vaughan Williams - The Winter Is Gone
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8Vaughan Williams - The Turtle Dove
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9MacMillan - The Gallant Weaver
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10Dove - Who Killed Cock Robin?
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11Grainger - The Three Ravens
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12Britten - Five Flower Songs, Op. 47: No. 4, The Evening Primrose
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13Warlock - 3 Dirges Of Webster: No. 1, All The Flowers Of The Spring
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14Elgar - 4 Part Songs, Op. 53: No. 4, Owls (An Epitaph)
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15Vaughan Williams - Rest
Europadisc Review
The disc opens with some of the most sublimely beautiful of British part-songs: Stanford’s heart-stopping setting of Mary Coleridge’s The Blue Bird, complete with five sopranos on the top line as requested by the composer but rarely heard, has an ethereal coolness to it. Elgar’s There is sweet music and Vaughan Williams’s Silence and Music offer exquisite microcosms of their respective composers’ musical personalities, as does Howells’s The summer is coming in, whose rich harmonies are every bit as suggestive as those of his sacred works. All are lovingly and subtly shaped by McCreesh and his superb team of singers, blended to perfection, and retaining just enough detachment that the music never tips over into cloying sentimentality.
A group of folk song settings forms the central section of the disc, kicking off with Percy Grainger’s quietly joyous setting of Brigg Fair, and including three Vaughan Williams settings, among them a magically textured performance of that great meditation on loss, The Turtle Dove. MacMillan’s The Gallant Weaver is an expertly-judged, inimitably Scottish song on a similar theme, while, among all the reflectiveness, Jonathan Dove’s virtuosic Who killed Cock Robin? provides a burst of energy while still being darkly suggestive. The bleak allure and Gothic undertones of Grainger’s The Three Ravens are underlined by skilful scoring and a nicely balanced harmonium accompaniment.
Britten’s deceptively simple The Evening Primrose leads to a closing group of more contemplative songs, including Peter Warlock’s arrestingly individual All the flow’rs of the spring, which sets a Jacobean text by John Webster to music of intensely personal harmonic daring. It receives perhaps the single finest performance of the whole collection, and it deserves it. Yet it doesn’t overshadow the concluding items, Elgar’s mysteriously elegiac Owls (composed in Rome on New Year’s Eve of 1907), and Vaughan Williams’s Christina Rossetti setting Rest, which seems to embrace both the natural and the Christian worlds in perfect harmony.
In a revealing booklet interview, McCreesh states that his starting point with this music is always the words and their expression, yet you’d also be hard-pushed to find a more musically polished or refined presentation of these works than they receive here. Tellingly, the sung texts come first in the sumptuous package that houses the disc, and throughout the book are weaved McCreesh’s own monochrome landscape photos taken on Wainwright’s ‘Coast to Coast’ walk from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay: the one of Oddendale limestone pavement is particularly evocative, showing, like many of the songs here, how extraordinary beauty can be found even in the most desolate of circumstances. Unquestionably one of this year’s choral highlights, and a must for all lovers of British music.
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