Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)
Folk Songs - Volume 2
Mary Bevan (soprano)
Nicky Spence (tenor)
Roderick Williams (baritone)
Thomas Gould (violin)
William Vann (piano)
Texts included
rec. 2020, Henry Wood Hall, London and 2016, Potton Hall, Suffolk (Two English Folk Songs)
ALBION RECORDS ALBCD043 [56:22]
The first volume in this series (see review) explains Albion’s ambition to record all 80 folk songs that Vaughan Williams arranged for voice and piano or violin, of which almost a quarter will be new to disc. The admirable scope and accomplishment of the first volume is happily continued in this second release in which Thomas Gould replaces Jack Liebeck in fiddling duties, but the three leading vocalists return.
There are two significant collections to consider. Nine English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachian Mountains was compiled in around 1938 but not published until 1967. They were collected by the familiar figures of Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles, as well as the American Olive Campbell, during the latter years of the First World War, and most derive from the North of England and the Scottish Lowlands, some deeply rooted in the seventeenth century. The tropes are familiar but the performances are, as before, marvelously alive without exaggerated point making. Whether it’s a would-be Murder Ballad, or fertility and virginity (The Lovers’ Tasks – better known as the reimagined balladry of Simon and Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair) or the piano-as-bardic harp accompaniment in Fair Margaret and Sweet William there is much to enjoy and engage in these imaginative settings. This even works when Nicky Spence overdubs in The Twelve Apostles, where the piano has an interlocutory role far removed from simple accompaniment of strophic folk songs. In fact, these songs often show Vaughan Williams mediating between the demands made on him to fashion a new kind of engagement with his material – neither antiquarianism nor dutiful editorialising, but fashioning a living currency for these songs quite as malleable and exciting as, say, Janáček’s Moravian songs.
Many years earlier, in 1917, VW compiled his A Selection of Collected Folk Songs Volume 1 and they are more compact in size and scope than the later cycle, though reflect much the same spirit of endeavour. Mary Bevan sings
I will give my Love an Apple with limpid beauty, whilst Roderick Williams relishes
The Painful Plough. The Farmyard Song seems to have caused much studio merriment, with Spence egged on by Mary Bevan’s farmyard impersonations. One day perhaps we will hear the outtakes for this.
Two English Folk Songs were previously issued on Albion ALBCD029 called Purer than Pearl and feature Gould. Searching for Lambs is a beauty, with the voice and violin coiling limpidly and there are strong hints of The Lark Ascending in the violin epilogue.
With comprehensive booklet notes and full texts, the recorded sound is finely balanced. Given there will be four discs in the series, we are now half-way through with many pleasures yet to come.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: John Quinn
Contents
Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachian Mountains (c.1938, pub. 1967)
The Rich Old Lady
The Tree in the Wood
Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor
The Lovers’ Tasks
John Randolph
Fair Margaret and Sweet William
Barbara Ellen
The House Carpenter
The Twelve Apostles
Two English Folk Songs for Voice and Violin (c.1913 pub. 1935)
Searching for Lambs
The Lawyer
A Selection of Collected Folk Songs Volume 1 (1917)
Down by the Riverside
I will give my Love an Apple
The Carter
The Painful Plough
My Boy Billy
The Fox
The Female Highwayman
Farmyard Song
