Notes and Editorial Reviews
This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
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BRITTEN
Folk Song Arrangements
•
Steve Davislim (ten); Simone Young (pn)
•
MELBA 301120 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 65:49)
The Salley Gardens. Little Sir William. The Bonny Earl o’Moray. The Trees They Grow So High. The Ash Grove. Oliver Cromwell. The Plough Boy.
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Sweet Polly Oliver. The Miller of Dee. The Foggy, Foggy Dew. O Waly Waly. Come You Not From Newcastle. The Brisk Young Widow. Sally in Our Alley. Early One Morning. Ca’ the Yowes. Tom Bowling. Greensleeves. Avenging and Bright. How Sweet the Answer. The Minstrel Boy. Dear Harp of My Country. Oft in the Stilly Night. The Last Rose of Summer
Britten was not committed to folk songs in the way that Grainger was, but he did set a fair number. This splendid collection presents about half of them, including the bulk of the British (including Irish) songs he arranged for voice and piano. They tend, on the whole, to be more polished, less coarse and irregular, less virtuosic, and less daring in harmony and texture than Grainger’s—as is obvious if you compare Britten’s setting of
Early One Morning
with Grainger’s 1940 voice-and-piano equivalent. In addition, while it would be hard to call this music consistently bright (in his excellent notes, David Pear provocatively insists that “folksongs are rarely happy”), there’s less violence in Britten than in Grainger. It’s emblematic of their differences in attitude that Britten set
Sweet Polly Oliver
while Grainger gravitated to
Bold William Taylor
. Both are stories of women who cross-dress to follow their military lovers; but
Bold William Taylor
requires an act of murder before it can twist to its ironically successful conclusion, whereas
Sweet Polly Oliver
merely needs an act of charity. Then, too, when violence does emerge, pacifist Britten backs away from it in a way that the sadomasochistic Grainger would not:
Avenging and Bright
is not really the kind of song that drew the best from Britten. Still, for all their relative decorum and reserve, these are far from neutral settings. Most striking are the otherworldly accompaniment of
Greensleeves
, the nightmarish rendering of
Miller of Dee
, and the odd harmonies that distort
Last Rose of Summer
; but there are subtle twists elsewhere in the program as well.
Steve Davislim has been praised often on these pages—and for good reason. He has a luxurious but extremely flexible voice, and he sings this repertoire with tremendous imagination when it comes to phrasing and timbre, especially in the darker or the more sentimental songs like
Sally in our Alley
(the more straightforward heartiness of
The Plough Boy
seems to interest him less). Philip Langridge, who covers most of this material on Naxos’s two-disc set of the complete folk-song settings (see Paul Ingram’s review in 29:2), has clearer enunciation and, perhaps, a slightly deeper appreciation of textual nuance; but Davislim’s vocal opulence more than compensates. Simone Young, best known as a conductor, accompanies deftly, knowing precisely how to make the piano’s contributions come across without elbowing her partner aside. Melba’s sound, especially in the tactfully engineered surround-sound tracks, gives an excellent sense of an acoustic space. Highly recommended.
FANFARE: Peter J. Rabinowitz
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Works on This Recording
1.
Folksong Arrangement(s) by Benjamin Britten
Performer:
Steve Davislim (Tenor),
Simone Young (Piano)
Period: 20th Century
Written: England
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