The Contrast: English Poetry in Song

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Huw Watkins’s Larkin settings are the main reason to invest in this recital — MusicWeb International, March 2020 More…

Release Date: 7th Feb 2020
Catalogue No: BIS2413
Label: BIS
Length: 80 minutes

Presto Editor's Choice

February 2020
Presto Recordings of the Year

Finalist 2020

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Walton: A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table (Version for Soprano & Piano)

Work length16:32

$6.00

$7.80

$10.50

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

No. 1, The Lord Mayor's Table

Track length3:19

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 2, Glide Gently

Track length2:46

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 3, Wapping Old Stairs

Track length2:26

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 4, Holy Thursday

Track length3:13

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 5, The Contrast

Track length2:47

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 6, Rhyme

Track length2:01

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Vaughan Williams: 3 Songs from Shakespeare

Work length3:03

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

No. 3, Orpheus with His Lute

Track length3:03

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Vaughan Williams: The Sky above the Roof

Work length2:46

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Excerpt, Vaughan Williams: The House of Life

Work length4:08

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

No. 2, Silent Noon

Track length4:08

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Bridge: Go Not, Happy Day, H. 34

Work length1:23

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Bridge: When Most I Wink, H. 5

Work length2:47

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Bridge: Adoration, H. 57

Work length2:57

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Bridge: Come to Me in my Dreams

Work length3:46

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Bridge: When You Are Old, H. 142

Work length4:00

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Bridge: Mantle of Blue, H. 131

Work length2:19

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Bridge: Love went a-riding

Work length1:50

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Watkins, H: 5 Larkin Songs

Work length12:30

$5.00

$6.50

$8.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

No. 1, Who Called Love Conquering

Track length2:47

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 2, Wants

Track length1:39

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 3, Love Songs in Age

Track length3:28

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 4, Money

Track length1:53

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 5, Dawn

Track length2:43

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Quilter: Dream Valley, Op. 20 No. 1

Work length2:20

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Quilter: 7 Elizabethan Lyrics, Op. 12 (Excerpts)

Work length4:53

$2.00

$2.60

$3.50

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

No. 7, Fair House of Joy

Track length1:53

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 6, By a Fountainside

Track length3:00

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Quilter: Arab Love Song, Op. 25 No. 4

Work length1:24

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Quilter: Autumn Evening, Op. 14 No. 1

Work length3:01

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

Quilter: 7 Elizabethan Lyrics, Op. 12 (Excerpts)

Work length1:41

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

No. 2, My Life's Delight

Track length1:41

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

Walton: 3 Songs to Poems (After "Façade")

Work length9:30

$3.00

$3.90

$5.25

Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano)

No. 1, Daphne

Track length2:58

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 2, Through Gilded Trellises

Track length4:05

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

No. 3, Old Sir Faulk

Track length2:27

$1.00

$1.30

$1.75

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About

Song composition has been a constant in British music since the lute and consort works of the early seventeenth century. By 1900, it had developed into a sophisticated genre embraced by almost all serious composers. The music on this amply-filled disc illustrates the diversity of British song-writing and its transformation over a century: from Vaughan Williams’s Orpheus and his Lute (ca 1901) to HuwWatkins’s Five Larkin Songs, composed in 2010 for Carolyn Sampson, who performs them here. Together with Joseph Middleton, her partner on several acclaimed recital discs, she has devised a highly contrasting programme bookended by two groups of songs by William Walton – A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table from 1962, celebrating the diversity of London, and three songs from Façade, the ‘entertainment’ with which the young composer gained both fame and notoriety in 1923.These frame settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilterand Frank Bridge of poetry by writers from Shakespeare and Shelley to Keats and Yeats. In comparison, the anti-romantic poems by Philip Larkin have been described as marked by ‘a very English, glum accuracy’. Huw Watkins (b. 1976) has selected texts from across Larkin’s output, catching the various moods – ranging from a certain unsentimental nostalgia to the poet’s seemingly habitual pessimism - in settings that often carry a bittersweet sting in the tail.

Reviews

March 2020

Huw Watkins’s Larkin settings are the main reason to invest in this recital

February 2020

This varied and vivid survey of English song gets off to an exuberant start with Walton’s rollicking paean to London, A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table, with Sampson by turns caustic and tender as the much-betrayed docker’s wife Molly in Wapping Old Stairs, and sustains its magic through a sequence of Bridge, Quilter and Vaughan Williams (including one of the loveliest Silent Noons you’re ever likely to hear). Huw Watkins’s arresting Larkin settings come across powerfully in their world premiere recording.

The Contrast

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