For a variety of reasons
these composers make good discmates.
McCabe wrote the first full-length biography
of Rawsthorne (who takes the lion’s
share of works here), who was in turn
a contemporary of Bush and they shared
work on The Prison Cycle in 1939, taking
the poem from Ernst Toller, then an
émigré in London. Tough
and spare though it frequently is –
two settings by Rawsthorne, three by
Bush with one of them acting as a ritornello
– both composers manage to vest the
lines with supra-ordinary shafts of
significance. After the earlier tension
and anguished despair listen to the
almost delusional lyricism that Bush
gives to the last lines of Die Dinge
which precisely mirror the lines’
own meaning. Rawsthorne’s setting plays
on a slightly off-centre lyricism, and
Bush’s reprise of the ritornello poem
Sechs, Schritte her (Six steps
forward/Six steps back) whilst bleakly
comfortless vocally nevertheless seems
to have some chordal strength in the
piano.
The Chinese Songs don’t
aspire to this level of complexity and
ambiguity. Instead there’s a deal of
romantic delicacy and straight-forwardness
about them – especially the bold "I
will carry my coat and not put on my
belt" with its "flapping"
piano writing to match the squally inclement
wind evoked in the poem. In the 1942
Two Songs Rawsthorne sets the kind of
poem that W Dennis Browne had set a
generation earlier; Rawsthorne is far
more austere of course but he uses counterpoint
extremely effectively and the second
of the songs is quite a frisky vamp.
Had he been listening to Britten’s Serenade?
It sounds like it.
Rawsthorne shows in
these little known settings that he
has the technique to hint and probe
with some depth. Hence the quietly unsettled
Carol and the half hints of fugal development
in Precursors (a tough sing that causes
some problems here). But as we’ve seen
his humour is not the wintry sort –
listen to the witty French Nursery Songs
– and the balladry and lightness of
the Scena Rustica. On the debit side
Two Fish is too late in the day and
elliptical for comfort; it wasn’t published
and a sense I’d rather it hadn’t been
recorded, though I see why it was. Of
the piano works here the Valse is cigarette-on-the-corner-of-the-mouth
insouciant. The Ballade was written
over Christmas 1929, hence the Good
King Wenceslas quotation, though this
lacy confection doesn’t quite live up
to its august name. We end with the
three attractive McCabe settings, full
of vigour, rollicking drunken sailors
and some whimsy. His setting of John
Peel is excellent fun – even if his
parenthetical disavowal of fox hunting
in the notes is unbearably pompous.
Notes are full, if
not typographically so easy to follow.
Performances vary from committed to
excellent and all stops in between:
timing on the short side. Despite the
fact that some might be tempted to think
of this as a bottom drawer exercise
I’d suggest rather that these pieces
demonstrate a side of Rawsthorne that
is present in much of his music but,
in these works, is made more explicit
– the lighter, more lyric, more obviously
affectionate side. A side worth getting
to know.
Jonathan Woolf
see also
review by Rob Barnett
Alison Wells (sop) 
