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Classical Music

Few British women composers of the early twentieth century are known today, either by name or by their music. Muriel Herbert is one who should be. ?Songs of Muriel Herbert? features many premiere recordings, each one beautifully delivered by soprano Ailish Tynan and tenor James Gilchrist, accompanied by David Owen Norris on piano.
? Muriel Herbert (1897 ? 1984) studied with Charles Stanford and Roger Quilter at the Royal College of Music, London. Her works consist mainly of songs inspired by poetry and works for violin and piano. This album focuses on her songs.
? Herbert was inspired by the poetry of many including Yeats and Joyce whom she met on many occasions. She was also intrigued by female poets such as Christina Rossetti. These songs have been brought back to life thanks to Herbert's daughter - the biographer Claire Tomalin. The songs are now all housed at the British Library Archive.
? The songs are hugely compelling and delightful and influences of one Herbert's favourite composers Debussy can be heard. Many of these songs are premiere recordings. Among the most popular are: Daffodils, Mirage, Autumn, Lost nightingale and Hips and haws.
? James Gilchristis in demand as a recitalist and chorus member and is a regular voice on BBC Radio 3 and a popular performer at the BBC Proms. He has sung at venues across Europe, America and the UK. His voice has been described as pure and sensitive with an even and beautiful tone. His first two solo albums on Linn Records were very well received; BBC Music Magazine listed ?Oh Fair To See? as a Benchmark Recording, and ?On Wenlock Edge? was a finalist in the Solo Vocal Album category at the 2008 Classic FM Gramophone Awards.
? In 2003 Ailish Tynan won the Rosenblatt Recital Prize at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. Other awards include the Maggie Teyte Competition, Miriam Licette Award and the RTÉ Millennium Singer of the Future.
? David Owen Norris has been a featured artist in the Gilmore Festival in Michigan and in the English Music Festival in Dorchester. In 2008 he has given recitals from Edinburgh to Guernsey, including the City of London Festival, the Tate Gallery conference on Vauxhall Gardens, the Three Choirs Festival and Cheltenham.
Track Listing:
1. Loveliest of Trees 2. I cannot lose thee for a day 3. The Crimson Rose 4. I hear an army charging 5. Jour des Morts (Cimetière Montparnasse) 6. She weeps over Rahoon 7. On a Time 8. Have you seen but a white lily grow? 9. I dare not ask a kiss 10. Horsemen 11. To Daffodils 12. How beautiful is night 13. Renouncement 14. I think on thee in the night 15. Faint Heart in a Railway Train 16. Rose kissed me today 17. Lean out of the window 18. Love?s Secret 19. MS. of Benedictbeuern (Carmina Burana) 20. Autumn 21. The Lost Nightingale 22. Jenny kiss?d me 23. Children?s Song 1: Merry-go-round 24. Children?s Song 2: The Gypsies 25. Children?s Song 3: The Tadpole 26. Children?s Song 4: Jack Spratt 27. Children?s Song 5: Acorn and Willow 28. Children?s Song 6: The Bunny 29. In the Days of November (Hips and haws) 30. The Lake Isle of Innisfree 31. David?s Lament for Jonathan 32. Most Holy Night 33. When Death to either shall come 34. Cradle Song 35. Violets 36. Tewkesbury Road Reviews: 04 May 2009 The Observer Fiona Maddocks Your heart doesn't necessarily leap when a scholar announces the discovery of four dozen baroque flute sonatas by someone with a name like Vaporetto. Legions of neglected composers await rediscovery. But on rare occasions, the "lost" talent is real, the pleasure of stumbling across a new body of work exciting and lasting. This is so with Muriel Herbert (1897-1984), brought back to life in this collection of her art songs and performed here by a superb trio of musicians. Their commitment alone endorses the music's quality. Herbert studied music in an era when professional women composers were rare as woodlarks, yet every genteel young woman was expected to play and sing. Born in Sheffield to a musical family, she grew up, in straitened circumstances, in Liverpool, winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Music during the First World War. There she met the great composers of the day - Charles Stanford and the homosexual Roger Quilter, with whom, to no avail, she fell in love. Preferring to work on a small scale, she started writing the elegant songs which would become her main preoccupations. She had some early success. After the war, she lived a bohemian existence, associating with James Joyce and WB Yeats, composing, teaching at a girls' school and singing. But a bad marriage and a pram in the hallway put paid to the bigger career she might have enjoyed. Now her daughter, writer Claire Tomalin, has gathered a collection of her mother's often melancholy songs. She chose texts from a cross-section of poets: AE Housman's "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now", Hardy's "Faint Heart in a Railway Carriage" (here retitled "Faint Heart in a Railway Train") and Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree". Piano accompaniments are poignant and skilfully played by David Owen Norris. Ailish Tynan and James Gilchrist sing with open-hearted commitment. I hope the pair incorporate many of these works into their recitals. Steeped in the English song tradition of the early 20th century, they grow on you with each listening. 14 April 2009 Musical Pointers Peter Grahame Woolf You just might have noted Muriel Emily Herbert's name in passing if you'd chanced upon Music Web's 2002 survey Some Women Composers - "Muriel Herbert's titles included Violets, Fountain Court, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Contentment, Have You Seen But a White Lily Grow? and the familiar Housman words Loveliest of Trees: clearly her taste in lyrics was above the average." That is all... She had studied with Stanford at the Royal College of Music. A few of her songs were published in the '20s and James Joyce thought her settings of his poems were "much too good for the words"! With motherhood, and at a time of disinterest in women composers, her musical career faded into oblivion. This collection of mostly unpublished songs from the '20s and '30's is a treasure trove, re-discovered by her daughter, noted biographer Claire Tomalin, who had packed away all her papers upon Muriel Herbert's death in 1984; no-one was interested in them - ?Everyone's mother wrote songs...' she was told (mine included !). But a little interest surfaced later, first in a radio programme by a former pupil who had been taught by her when he was a boy soprano and who eventually produced this disc... This wonderful CD is the eventual outcome. It is not just Muriel Herbert's taste in poetry that was exceptional; so was her unselfconscious ease in prosody, the setting of words to music, which made me think of Hugo Wolf's. This has been an altogether happy project, with both Ailish Tynan and James Gilchrist in fine voice, supported ideally by David Owen Norris. These are honest songs that should find a welcome in anyone's recital. There is emotion which never becomes mawkish, and wit a-plenty. I greatly regret not having been able to come across Herbert's Children's Songs to Ada Harrison poems when I was trawling the publishers and libraries for repertoire for my boy singer son Simon; they are just as good as Malcolm Williamson's A Child's Garden which he recorded. You can access on Linn's website full information including sound samples of all the songs, two of the shortest Children's Songs, Merry-Go-Round and The Bunny complete. The songs are now archived at the British Library.

Classical Music

The settings heard on this disc meld together the talents of two outstanding creative artists, the composer Paul Honey and the poet Gregory Warren Wilson, producing a collection in which the inner life of the listener is both confronted and empowered. Warren Wilson's metaphysically-infused set of haiku, Earth's Imagined Corners, derives it's title from the seventh of John Donne's Divine Meditations, in an evocative setting for sixteen unaccompanied voices and solo cello. It was conceived as a sequence of four individual movements (Willows, Leatherback, Fireflies, Pomegranates), three of which invoke the fundamental elemental forces at work on our planet - water, earth, and fire. The final constant explored here is time, that boundless exponential continuum within which the human experience itself unfolds.

Continuing the recent resurgence of interest in Pamela Harrison's work, this album presents a compelling collection of her chamber music and songs, curated by the esteemed clarinettist Robert Plane. The album showcases Harrison's distinctive style, characterized by an elegant, understated idiom reflective of mid-20th-century English music. This album features the premier recordings of a selection of Harrison's songs, alongside her chamber works, ranging from large-scale ensemble pieces to intimate miniatures. The performers, a mix of distinguished teaching staff from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and talented recent graduates, bring fresh vitality to Harrison's music, ensuring her legacy endures. Harrison's compositions, often overlooked, are rediscovered here with a sensitivity and clarity that highlight their timeless charm and sophisticated craftsmanship. This release is a testament to Harrison's unique voice and her significant, yet underappreciated, contribution to British music.

The Linarol Consort is joined by acclaimed tenor, James Gilchrist, for this, the second volume of viol music composed for the wealthiest and most influential of German merchants of the sixteenth century, Jacob Fugger, who is held to be one of the wealthiest individuals in history. Recorded from a new edition of a manuscript held in the vast collection of the National Library of Austria, this rare recording champions viol consort pieces from some of the greatest German, Flemish and French composers of the time.

SOMM Recordings adds to it's already extensive catalogue of music by the British composer and BBC Radio 3 broadcaster Stephen Dodgson�(1924�- 2013) with a third volume of his songs titled Turn Ye to Me. SOMM's previous Dodgson song releases include The Peasant Poet [SOMMCD 0659], hailed by Opera Today as "an incredibly interesting and engaging disc... done excellent service by all the performers;" and The Distances Between [SOMMCD 0673], about which the�British Music Society�said "the performances (by some prestigious names) and the warm, lifelike recording are impeccable." The performers on this third volume of Dodgson songs include prior SOMM�artists also featured in Volumes I and II: Irish soprano Ailish Tynan and British mezzo-soprano Katie Bray, both past winners of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition; doctor-turned-tenor James Gilchrist, who is noted for his forthright and passionate style; Roderick Williams, one of the most sought-after baritones of his generation; guitarist and Dodgson specialist, Mark Eden; and GRAMMY� Award-winning pianist, Christopher Glynn. The recital opens with a first release of Three Songs to words of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who died by suicide in 1849 aged 45. Tandaradei is his translation of the 13th-century German love poem, Under der linden, by�Walther von der Vogelweide. Dirge and The Old Crow of Cairo are from Beddoes's posthumously published drama Death's Jest Book. Three single songs include settings of Andrew Marvell's pastoral poem The Mower to the Glow-Worms; George Meredith's sonnet Winter Heavens; and Matthew Prior's poem Daphne to Apollo inspired by Greek myth and set to guitar accompaniment. Two short solo piano pieces are from a set of Eight Fanciful Pieces-included in full on SOMM's 2024 release of piano music by Dodgson [SOMMCD 0684.] The marcato (marked) tempo of Il Zoppo suggests an irregular gait, while the contemplative Mirage hints at an Impressionistic style. Dodgson composed three sets of Bush Ballads based on texts by Australian poets and Australian folk verses. This release of the third series is a first recording. All Got a Mate sets an anonymous text as a folk duet. Rollicking, but steady is the tempo marking for Song of the Squatters to words by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson. The group closes with a quieter setting of Waitin'-a-While by Jim Grahame. Two single songs from 1950 include The Stone, marked Moderato: Calmo, to words adapted from Hal Summers, and the title song, Turn Ye to Me, which is a gently haunting Hebridean air with lyrics by Christopher North. The recital closes with London Lyrics, a cycle of five songs for tenor and guitar set to poetry by five different poets across four centuries-including Wilfred Owen and Cecil Day-Lewis-all inspired by Dodgson's home city. The composer draws expressive and captivating range from voice and guitar, exquisitely executed here by James Gilchrist and Mark Eden.

Born in Sussex in 1877, Roger Quilter was a fellow-student of Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott, and H. Balfour Gardiner at the Hoch Conservatory, in Frankfurt, where he studied for almost five years under the guidance of the German professor of composition Iwan Knorr. He is best known for his contribution to English art song, having composed around 150 songs, many of which remain regular recital favourites. For this album, the tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook explore his output from early works such as 'Now sleeps the crimson petal' through to late examples such as 'The Ash Grove'. All of the songs are settings of English texts, with the exception of the Four Songs of Mirza Schaffy, which set German texts by Friedrich von Bodenstedt. The musicians have arranged their selection of twenty-seven songs into thematic groups - Shakespeare songs, songs about flowers, folksongs, songs of love etc. - which makes for a fascinating and rewarding programme.

Discovering Wilfred HeatonPremiere recordings of major instrumental works by a remarkable yet overlooked English composer Wilfred Heaton (1918-2000) is a name well-revered in brass band circles, but nearly unknown in the wider world of classical music.�Discovering Wilfred Heaton�seeks to change that with no less than seven premiere recordings from pianists Murray McLachlan and Rose McLachlan, tenor James Gilchrist, clarinetist Linda Merrick, and flutist Alex Jakeman. The album is anchored by the first recording of Heaton's monumental Piano Sonata, which was performed in 2024 to rapturous applause by Murray McLachlan at Manchester's Stoller Hall. The Sonata, composed in the 1950s, is a work of striking ambition and depth. Harmonically daring, emotionally raw, and technically formidable, it stands comparison with the great mid-century sonatas of Bartok and Prokofiev. From the muscular counterpoint of it's opening, through a grief-tinged slow movement and a dazzling finale, Heaton's sonata reveals a powerful, individual voice he was fearless in embracing big themes, bold melodies, and contemporary idioms. Also featured are first recordings of the�Three Pieces for Piano�(1954), and the poignant piano suite�Pilgrim Reflections, adapted from Heaton's mystery play�Pilgrim's Song. A selection of Heaton's rarely-heard�songs written in his youth and again in later life are performed here by the acclaimed tenor�James Gilchrist, accompanied by�Rose McLachlan. Together, these works illuminate Heaton's stylistic evolution: his command of bitonality, rhythmic complexity, and melodic invention, rooted in a deep understanding of Bach and Brahms, and influenced by Walton, Hindemith, Bartok and Stravinsky. Heaton's career was shaped by a lifelong tension between personal conviction and professional ambition. A deeply private Yorkshireman, he turned away from a mainstream musical path after early promise studying with Matyas Seiber and submitting works to the Society for the Promotion of New Music choosing instead a life of teaching, reflection, and selective composition. The result is a body of work of exceptional quality, much of it unpublished or unheard until now. This album is not only a significant act of musical archaeology by Heaton's biographer and editor Paul Hindmarsh� - it is a compelling argument for Heaton's inclusion among Britain's most original post-war composers. Track highlights:-Piano Sonata (premiere recording) - Murray McLachlan, piano-Three Pieces for Piano (1954)-Pilgrim Reflections (suite for solo piano) For fans of:�Bartok, Britten, Prokofiev, William Walton, Elisabeth Lutyens, early Tippett. An essential discovery for collectors, performers, and listeners drawn to British 20th-century repertoire beyond the usual names.

Divine Art presents the songs of Thomas Pitfield, a revered composer whose catalogue boasts over 150 songs crafted over a lifetime of creativity and dedication. From heartfelt dedications to friends and colleagues to whimsical folk-inspired tunes, Pitfield's compositions offer a kaleidoscope of emotions and experiences, showcasing his versatility and depth as an artist.

This meticulously curated selection of songs is elegantly presented in a volume adorned with his own captivating artwork. The collection stands as a testament to Pitfield's legacy with evocative interpretations of his songs by acclaimed tenor James Gilchrist, accompanied by the virtuosic pianist Nathan Williamson. With Gilchrist's emotive performances and Williamson's consummate skill at the keys, listeners are invited on a sophisticated journey through the melodies and moods of Pitfield's musical landscape. The album celebrates the remarkable legacy of Thomas Pitfield, whose enduring contributions to the world of music continue to resonate and inspire.

James Gilchrist
Renowned for his expressive interpretations and captivating stage presence, James Gilchrist embarked on a full-time music career in 1996 after beginning his professional life as a doctor. With a repertoire spanning from baroque to contemporary music, Gilchrist has performed in prestigious venues worldwide under the baton of renowned conductors such as Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Harry Christophers. His discography boasts a diverse range of recordings, including critically acclaimed interpretations of British song cycles and baroque masterpieces.

Nathan Williamson
Pianist and composer Nathan Williamson is celebrated for his innovative collaborations and dynamic performances. From recording projects with esteemed tenor James Gilchrist to premiering compositions by contemporary composers, Williamson's artistry knows no bounds. His discography includes acclaimed recordings of American and British piano repertoire, earning praise for his thoughtful interpretations and passionate delivery. As both performer and composer, Williamson continues to push the boundaries of classical music, captivating audiences with his boundless creativity and virtuosity.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce a thrilling first collaboration between long-time SOMM stablemates, baritone Roderick Williams and the Coull Quartet, joined by tenor James Gilchrist and soprano Sophie Bevan. With six world premiere recordings, On This Shining Night is a ravishing recital focusing revealingly on a 20th-century phenomenon: works for voice and string quartet. It takes its title from a James Agate setting by Samuel Barber (whose masterly "Dover Beach" is also heard), here in a sublime arrangement by Roderick Williams. Williams also provides arrangements of Barber’s "Sleep Now" and three Frederick Delius pieces from his Seven Songs from the Norwegian: the evocative "Twilight Fancies," vivacious "Young Venevil" and exotic "I-Brasil." They serve, as Robert Matthew-Walker’s erudite booklet notes observe, as companions to 11 songs by Delius’s close friend and associate, Peter Warlock, including the gentle intimacy of "Corpus Christi," the “mini-cantata” "Sorrow’s Lullaby," and unique free-recitative of "My gostly vader."

Composed for Williams and the Coull Quartet, Sally Beamish’s five-part Tree Carols offer striking, variegated settings of poems by Fiona Sampson in their premiere recording. Roderick Williams’ SOMM catalogue include the acclaimed three-volume Twelve Sets of English Lyrics by Hubert Parry (SOMMCD 257, 270, 272), Sally Beamish’s Four Songs from Hafez (Birdsong, SOMMCD 0633), and the classic English song cycles A Shropshire Lad and Maud (SOMMCD 0615), which MusicWeb International declared a “game changer… in terms of our appreciation of Arthur Somervell’s songs”. The Coull Quartet has recorded a wide repertoire for SOMM. Their recording of Nicholas Maw and Benjamin Britten quartets (SOMMCD 065) was a Gramophone Editor’s Choice and a BBC Music Magazine Benchmark Recording. Gramophone declared their recent SOMM release with Clélia Iruzun, Treasures from the New World, featuring piano quintets by Amy Beach and Henrique Oswald (SOMMCD 0609), “a delight”.