Albion Records’ exploration of Vaughan Williams’s complete published arrangements of folk song in English with instrumental accompaniment has now reached the third volume, the lion’s share of which is given over to the 1908 anthology Folk Songs from the Eastern Counties (Book 2 in Cecil Sharp’s series Folk Songs of England). This contains some 15 numbers, the first six of which were sung to the composer at Ingrave, Herongate and Billericay in Essex, and include the indelible ‘Bushes and Briars’ (the first song he ever collected and which, he later recalled, ‘set all my doubts about folk song at rest’) and haunting ‘As I walked out’ (‘a good example of the extraordinary breadth and melodic sweep which is to be found in English Folk-Song’, he noted at the time). Of the seven songs that RVW collected in King’s Lynn and the surrounding area on a productive visit in January 1905, four found a place in the orchestral Norfolk Rhapsodies he wrote the following year – ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’ and ‘On Board a Ninety-Eight’ in the much-loved No 1, ‘The Saucy Bold Robber’ in No 2 and ‘Ward, the Pirate’ in No 3 (the manuscript and parts of which disappeared without trace during the First World War). Two endearing offerings from Cambridgeshire – ‘Geordie’ and ‘Harry the Tailor’ – round off a most invigorating sequence, Roderick Williams’s exemplary renderings of ‘Bushes and Briars’, ‘The Lark in the Morning’ and ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’ having first appeared on a previous Albion anthology (entitled ‘Time and Space’) featuring songs by RVW and Holst (1/20).

It’s followed by something of a curio, a volume published by Novello in 1931 under the title Twelve Traditional Country Dances. Collected by Maud Karpeles from various sources including Northumberland, Devon, Vermont and Newfoundland, they are presented in arrangements for solo piano that it seems the composer himself was never entirely happy with. (‘The result seems to me rather bald,’ he wrote to Karpeles, ‘but if it is at all like what you want, that is all that matters!’) Next come three ‘specimen accompaniments’ that appeared in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959), a collaboration with singer and collector Albert Lloyd (1908 82) which RVW had all but completed by the time of his death; ‘The Banks of Green Willow’ makes you appreciate the genius of George Butterworth’s tweaking of the melody in his eponymous 1913 idyll for orchestra. Two rousing sea-song arrangements incorporating ad lib choral contributions – from Vol 3 of The Motherland Song Book (1919) – conclude the programme in fine style, ‘The Arethusa’ instantly recognisable to many from Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea-Songs.

I need merely confirm that performances, sound and presentation are once again wholly beyond reproach. Bring on the fourth and final instalment!