The delightful, and touching, collaboration (if that is the word for it) of Gurney and Finzi is a prime attraction here. Gurney published his Five Elizabethan Songs in 1920, and Finzi orchestrated four of them (omitting ‘Tears’) in 1943, by which time Gurney of course was dead; nevertheless there is a real sense of two minds, individual but sympathetic, at work on a shared project. On record, each of the songs has been heard with piano accompaniment, and Martyn Hill and Clifford Benson have very beautifully recorded the complete set (‘War’s Embers’, Hyperion, 3/90); but Finzi’s arrangements, made for his string players at Newbury, are new to the Gramophone Database. In a most sensitive way Finzi ‘lifts’ the songs, releasing a rhythmic spring, lighting the lyricism.
The student work of Howells, who orchestrated two deeply felt songs of Gurney in 1917, has not such an individual touch, but is also a pleasure to hear, as are the songs of Stanford and Parry, all new to most of us in this form. The orchestrations are more than a dressing-up: Stanford’s Whitman setting, ‘To the Soul’, gains in flavour and (somehow) status, and his scoring of ‘The Fairy Lough’ is a masterly exercise of what, in his excellent notes, Jeremy Dibble describes as a ‘pointillistic skill’, in 1909 very much of its period.
Enjoyment of the performances is for myself limited by the unevenness of Christopher Maltman’s voice-production. On record I have always found this troublesome in some degree, but here the degree is not one that can be ignored. In quiet passages the sound is pleasing; not so as the volume increases. Happily, he is at his best in the Gurney set, and the relatively high climax of Sleep suits him well. In Finzi’s own set of Elizabethan songs, Let us garlands bring, comparison with an earlier recording by Stephen Varcoe with the City of London Sinfonia under Hickox confirms that the new one is distinctly inferior, and not only in the singing: the slow speeds are dull and ponderous, making ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’, usually the loveliest, very nearly tedious.'