<<  -- 2 --  Roderic Dunnett    LASTING FRIENDSHIPS

There were what Burnside dubbed 'soft hummocks of Quilter and Elgar'; three settings of Housman's Far in a Western Brookland: Gurney's (one of his best); Bax's, with almost Szymanowskian yearning chromatics; and Gurney contemporary Benjamin Burrows (1891-1966), again with sighing chromatic culmination: one of three mixed-quality Burrows songs Burnside included.

Then too, much John Ireland: the ostinatoed trump of The Encounter ('A single redcoat turns his head ...'), where -- depending on the age of the redcoat -- Housman's and Ireland's predilections perhaps quietly intertwined; the inevitable Sea Fever; the touchingly slow, pained Brooke setting Spring Sorrow, composed in 1918, three years after the poet's death in the Aegean; plus the dishevelled fun of Hardy's Great Things -- the last three all forming part of a superb, galvanising closing recital by Brett Polegato.

There was Frank Bridge's Go not happy day (1903) -- a Tennyson text wonderfully set elsewhere (within the song-cycle Maud) by Somervell, whose Housman setting White is the Moon featured alongside Lennox Berkeley's dramatic, fire-fringed treatment of Tennyson ('Tonight the winds ...'), C W Orr's This time of year and Martin Bussey's glorious, declamatory Reveille ('Wake! The silver dusk returning ...').

The baritone Roderick Williams and tenor James Gilchrist supplied the lion's share of this weekend, Williams excelling in the lovely long, riding line of W Denis Browne's Arabia (amazingly, as late as 1914 -- before the doomed Browne embarked on the war -- the first known setting of de la Mare); superbly astride of the restrained impressionism and assertive (even prescient?) final line of Butterworth's On the idle hill of summer ('Woman bore me, I will rise' -- compare Gurney's 'It is most grand to die' from By a Bierside); touching in RVW's L'amour de moy; bringing rich resonance to the floating vocal line of If in the great bazaars by Amy Woodforde-Finden (1860-1919); perfection itself in placing Gurney's personal testament from the trenches, Severn Meadows; and profoundly moving in alternating duet with Gilchrist in the Butterworth/Housman eclogue Is my team ploughing?

Despite his slight initial tendency to overproject for the Assembly Rooms' intimate acoustic, Gilchrist delivered some treasures: shining in the exquisite impressionistic transitions and unexpected cadences of Malcolm Williamson's exquisite R L Stevenson setting The Flowers (from the sequence/cycle based on A Child's Garden of Verses); bringing out the extraordinary psychodrama of RVW's Bredon Hill ('... and went to church alone.'); and bringing his unique, committed, almost aggressive musical personality and zest to enhance Tippett's Midsummer Marriage -- anticipating sprung rhythms, and the final Pearsian ascent into 'the immense shining void', in Boyhood's End.

Tippett's 'cantata', a setting of W H Hudson's 1918 memories of a fifteenth birthday spent in South America, formed a key part of Saturday's Songs from the Exotic (the title stems from Judith Weir's collection, the pick of that bunch being the final Gaelic 'song of a girl ravished away y the fairies in South Uist'); just as the Williamson heralded a Sunday programme devoted to gardens, trees, saplings and 'green' issues that embraced even Maxwell Davies and Kit and the Widow.

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