Information
Composer: John Ireland
Roderick Williams, baritone
Iain Burnside, piano
Date: 2008
Label: Naxos
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.570467
- (01) Great Things
- (02-04) Three Songs to Poems by Thomas Hardy
- (05) Sea Fever
- (06) The Bells of San Marie
- (07) Vagabond
- (08) Santa Chiara (Psalm Sunday: Naples)
- (09) Two Songs: I. Tryst (in Fountain Court)
- (10) During Music
- (11-13) Marigold (Impressions for Voice and Piano)
- (14) I have Twelve Oxen
- (15-17) We'll to the Woods
- (18-22) Five Poems by Thomas Hardy
- (23) Two Songs: II. The Cost
- (24) When I am dead, my dearest
- (25) Song Sacred and Profane: IV. The Salley Gardens
- (26) Tutto è sciolto
- (27) If there were dreams to sell
Roderick Williams, baritone
Iain Burnside, piano
Date: 2008
Label: Naxos
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.570467
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Singer and pianist manage to pin down Ireland’s elusive quality
Despite the popularity of “Sea Fever” and (literally) two or three others, the songs of John Ireland
are often found oddly inaccessible. I would say that this recital will facilitate access. Of all the acknowledged masters of English songs in the 20th century Ireland is the hardest to pin down, to identify even. It has something to do with an elusiveness about his writing for the voice. When you look at the piano parts you feel contact with a pair of hands (his) touching the keyboard; but (with few exceptions) it’s hard to believe that he “sang” the songs as he wrote. The point here is that Roderick Williams is such a good singer he can make the voice part sound vocal and natural in a way not many have succeeded in doing. The songs are high for baritone, low for tenor, and they are written in a way that seems not to know of the difficulties of passing from one area of the voice to another or returning to a particular region with uncomfortable persistency. For Roderick Williams such difficulties seem hardly to exist. The listener’s task eases proportionately.
Before going further, it should be said that the pianist, Iain Burnside, plays with a sureness of touch to match the highly skilled naturalness of Williams’s singing. And it has to be added that Williams still does not seem to be a communicator in song in the sense that we can see the images flash before him (Terfel-like) as he sings the words. Sometimes, as in “The Vagabond” (Masefield, not Stevenson) and “If there were dreams to sell”, he catches the mood extraordinarily well even so. Conscious of resorting finally to the personal and subjective, I have to report finding more sympathy, a clearer feeling for Ireland’s anxious tenderness and uneasy joy than in any previous recital of his songs.
-- John Steane, Gramophone
More reviews:
BBC Music Magazine PERFORMANCE: ***** / SOUND: ****
https://www.allmusic.com/album/ireland-songs-mw0001868547
https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.570467&languageid=EN
Despite the popularity of “Sea Fever” and (literally) two or three others, the songs of John Ireland
are often found oddly inaccessible. I would say that this recital will facilitate access. Of all the acknowledged masters of English songs in the 20th century Ireland is the hardest to pin down, to identify even. It has something to do with an elusiveness about his writing for the voice. When you look at the piano parts you feel contact with a pair of hands (his) touching the keyboard; but (with few exceptions) it’s hard to believe that he “sang” the songs as he wrote. The point here is that Roderick Williams is such a good singer he can make the voice part sound vocal and natural in a way not many have succeeded in doing. The songs are high for baritone, low for tenor, and they are written in a way that seems not to know of the difficulties of passing from one area of the voice to another or returning to a particular region with uncomfortable persistency. For Roderick Williams such difficulties seem hardly to exist. The listener’s task eases proportionately.
Before going further, it should be said that the pianist, Iain Burnside, plays with a sureness of touch to match the highly skilled naturalness of Williams’s singing. And it has to be added that Williams still does not seem to be a communicator in song in the sense that we can see the images flash before him (Terfel-like) as he sings the words. Sometimes, as in “The Vagabond” (Masefield, not Stevenson) and “If there were dreams to sell”, he catches the mood extraordinarily well even so. Conscious of resorting finally to the personal and subjective, I have to report finding more sympathy, a clearer feeling for Ireland’s anxious tenderness and uneasy joy than in any previous recital of his songs.
-- John Steane, Gramophone
More reviews:
BBC Music Magazine PERFORMANCE: ***** / SOUND: ****
https://www.allmusic.com/album/ireland-songs-mw0001868547
https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.570467&languageid=EN
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John Ireland (13 August 1879 – 12 June 1962) was an English composer and teacher of classical music. He studied piano with Frederic Cliffe and composition with Charles Villiers Stanford. He was strongly influenced by Debussy and Ravel as well as by the earlier works of Stravinsky and Bartók. From these influences, he developed his own brand of "English Impressionism", related more closely to French and Russian models than to the folk-song style then prevailing in English music. Ireland favoured small forms and wrote neither symphonies nor operas, although his Piano Concerto is considered among his best works.
***
Roderick Williams (born 1965 in London) is a British baritone and composer. He was a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then became a music teacher. At age 28, he resumed music studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London. At Guildhall, he made his operatic debut as Tarquinius in Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. Williams first appeared at The Proms in 1996, as the Royal Herald in Verdi's Don Carlos. He was a soloist at the 2014 Last Night of the Proms, which included performances of his own arrangements of two songs. His commercial recordings include albums for Naxos and for Signum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Williams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Williams
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