EMR CD087 | DETAILS
  EMR CD087
   
 

SPLENDID TEARS
Settings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
   
  Brian Thorsett (ten.)
Richard Masters (pf.)
   
  EAN 5 060263 500810

A perusal of a catalogue of English-language musical settings quickly reveals the powerful attaction composers have had to the verse of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poetry is rich in imagery, playing upon the threads of grief, love, redemption, and, perhaps most important to the settings on this disc, inner turmoil. The longer poems present narratives with strongly drawn characters and narrative arcs befitting a song-cycle; it is no wonder that the three composers represented on this disc — Maude White, Arthur Somervell and Liza Lehmann — could not resist setting portions of two of Tennyson’s best-known works, “In Memoriam” and “Maude”.

 

This recording offers three World Premières, being the first-ever recording of the four Maude White songs and the first recordings by a tenor of the two significant cycles by Lehmann and Somervell.

TRACK LISTING AND AUDIO EXTRACTS
     
Maude Valérie White (1855–1937)
FOUR SONGS FROM TENNYSON’S “IN MEMORIAM” (World Première recording)
1. “I Sometimes Hold It Half a Sin”  
2. “’Tis Better to Have Loved and Lost”  
3. “Love Is and Was My Lord and King”  
4. “Be near Me When My Light Is Low”  
       
Liza Lehmann (1862–1918)
“IN MEMORIAM” — A SONG CYCLE
5. “I Sing to Him”  
6. “O Sorrow, Wilt Thou Live With Me”  
7. “If Sleep and Death Be Truly One”  
8. “Risest Thou Thus, Dim Dawn, Again”  
9. “When on My Bed the Moonlight Falls”  
10. “I Cannot See the Features Right”  
11. “Wild Bird, Whose Warble, Liquid Sweet”  
12. “To Sleep I Give My Powers Away”  
13. “Sweet after Showers, Ambrosial Air”  
14. “Who Loves Not Knowledge?”  
       
Arthur Somervell (1863–1937)
CYCLE OF SONGS FROM TENNYSON’S “MAUD”
15. “I Hate the Dreadful Hollow”  
16. “A Voice by the Cedar Tree”  
17. “She Came to the Village Church”  
18. “O Let the Solid Ground”  
19. “Birds in the High Hall-Garden”  
20. “Maud Has a Garden”  
21. “Go Not Happy Day”  
22. “I Have Led Her Home”  
23. “Come into the Garden, Maud”  
24. “The Fault Was Mine”  
25. “Dead, Long Dead”  
26. “O That ’Twere Possible”  
27. “My Life Has Crept So Long”  

 

REVIEWS
Beautifully shaped by Benjamin Frith... Beguiling sounds, graced by the tawny richness and unexaggerated line of Richard Jenkinson’s cello playing... The sense of purpose and sureness of line of Ian Venables’ music is pure oxygen.
EMR CD31 | BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Exquisitely rewarding... Ravishing accounts.
EMR CD029 | CHOIR AND ORGAN
This is music of great beauty and integrity and the performances fully do it justice. It would be criminal to let it pass you by.

EMR CD028 | INTERNATIONAL
RECORD REVIEW

The Bridge Quartet approach these pieces with a sympathetic and insightful warmth, and confirm their ambassadorial credentials for British chamber music. A lovely, radiant disc.
EMR CD025 | Gramophone
Duncan Honeybourne’s playing is astonishingly affectionate, yet never saccharine... Honeybourne plays with suave confidence.
EMR CD024 | INTERNATIONAL PIANO
Rupert Marshall-Luck is an ideal interpreter: generously but not effusively lyrical; agile and athletic... The warm, folk-song like slow movement is at times almost painfully beautiful, with a shimmering pastoral central section... Marshall-Luck is, again, indefatigable and keenly picks up on the work’s melancholic strain.  Finely recorded and with comprehensive booklet notes, this is a must for fans of 20th-century English repertoire.
EMR CD023 | THE STRAD