Charles Villiers Stanford:
The Blue Bird

Edward Elgar:
There is Sweet Music
Owls (An Epitaph)

Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Silence and Music
Bushes and Briars
The Winter is Gone
The Turtle Dove
Rest

Herbert Howells:
The Summer is Coming

Percy Grainger:
Brigg Fair
The Three Ravens

James MacMillan:
The Gallant Weaver

Jonathan Dove:
Who Killed Cock Robin?

Benjamin Britten:
The Evening Primrose

Peter Warlock:
All The Flowers of the Spring

This programme explores that vast twentieth-century secular English choral repertoire which goes under the generic title ‘partsongs’. It is an extraordinarily rich repertoire to which almost all the famous composers contributed. Buried amongst vast quantities of slightly twee pastoralism – the much-derided “cow-pat” school – are to be found many settings of glorious poetry, forming a corpus of sublime twentieth-century madrigals at least as fine as their famous renaissance forebears. However, this programme has another particular theme: how poets and composers reflect upon the natural world as a metaphor for our own emotional experience. At the heart of this programme is the complex relationship between man and nature, the bitter-sweetness of a radiant and beautiful dawn creating the same unbearable sadness of a ravishing song, and both with intimations of mortality.

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Recording: Charterhouse School Chapel, Surrey, 9-11 July 2016