This is the second volume in a projected series of six, the first of which (3/95) concentrated on English song in the 1920s. The new issue goes back to the founding fathers. All three composers here wrote for the drawing-room as much as the concert hall, but in taste and accomplishment they far exceeded the limits of the sentimental or jovial ballads that were so popular, and led the genre in the direction of the European art-song, with Brahms as a potent influence. At the same time they worked within the stylistic scope of a distinctive national school, so that Somervell and Parry preserved their English identity as surely as Stanford his Irish origins.
At the centre of this recital stands Somervell’s Shropshire Lad cycle of 1904. Michael Pilkington’s excellent notes draw attention to its careful ordering of the texts: the only setting, he claims, to be conceived as ‘a true narrative cycle’. Whether it reflects, or even suggests, the troubled heart of the poems is more than questionable: the idiom is too comfortable, and Somervell can no more translate Housman into music than Parry could the Book of Job. Yet within these limitations he is not superficial, and each hearing brings a warmer recognition of what he does achieve. In this process, the piano part is a constant source of pleasure, especially when played as well as it is here. Malcolm Martineau is an accompanist with life in his fingers: the gently importunate bell calling to the lovers on Bredon Hill and the sharp-smitten march of the soldiers’ tread find him with the right touch for both.
The singing is more variable. Sarah Leonard has such a clean style and such accuracy of intonation, and moreover produces some perfectly lovely tone in quiet passages, that it seems ungrateful to note the loss of quality at a forte; it is inescapable, however, right from the start, with Parry’s ‘My heart is like a singing bird’. Her brother has a firm baritone voice and clear enunciation, but certainly not on present showing a Terfelish ability to make a song develop as actual, present experience. The remaining pleasure is real enough, the series deserving all success in its admirable aim of bringing so much underestimated music to wider notice.'