SOMM RECORDINGS is delighted to announce Vaughan Williams – A Birthday Garland, a recording of baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Susie Allan’s popular 2022 concert tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams originally marking the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
Curating a “fantasy birthday party concert” in tribute to “the grand-daddy of 20th-century English song”, Williams has assembled pieces by RVW and 18 fellow composers. The result is a wide-ranging celebration of the rich variety of English song over a century and more that pays tribute to Vaughan Williams’ influence with songs inspired by poets ranging from Shakespeare and Tennyson to W.B. Yeats and Walt Whitman.
Works:
•Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Splendour Falls
• Ralph Vaughan Williams: Linden Lea
• The Call;
• A Clear Midnight
• The Twilight People
• When Icicles Hang by the Wall
• I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope
• Menelaus
• Charles Wood: Fortune and her Wheel
• Maurice Ravel: Chanson ecossaise
• Max Bruch: O Saw Ye My Father
• Rebecca Clarke: Down by the Salley Gardens
• Grace Williams: Jim Cro
• George Butterworth: Roving in the Dew
• Gustav Holst: Darest Thou Now O Soul
• Ina Boyle: The Last Invocation
• Ivor Gurney: Reconciliation
• Charles Villiers Stanford: Joy, Shipmate, Joy
• Ruth Gipps: The Pulley
• Herbert Howells: The Sorrow of Love
• Elizabeth Maconchy: The Wind and the Rain
• Hubert Parry: Under the Greenwood Tree
• Madeleine Dring: Take, O Take Those Lips Away
• Gerald Finzi: Who is Silvia
• Sarah Cattley: A Square and Candlelighted Boat
• Roderick Williams: The Shepherd