The Picture Gallery at Paxton House is sold out for the first concert of this year’s Music at Paxton Festival. The Paxton Estate, like other parts of the eastern Borders, was severely hit by Storm Arwen and lost many trees, but the grounds are colourful with floral tubs, the Marquee is in place, and the Picture Gallery is back to full capacity last year’s very welcome, but still distanced events.
Baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Susie Allan present a programme of British Song which includes a commissioned song cycle composed by Sarah Cattley. Also on stage is Jerome Knox, a young baritone, a graduate of Edinburgh University and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Opera School.
The concert is also part of the festival’s celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the songs in the first half are written by composers whom he taught or influenced. We begin with George Butterworth’s ‘Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad’. Butterworth was a friend of Vaughan Williams and shared his enthusiasm for folksong. These setting of A. E. Housman’s poems are firmly set in this tradition. After a delicate piano opening, ‘Loveliest of Trees’ begins with a short unaccompanied phrase in the higher baritone range. An ear-catching moment, and Williams captures the solemnity of the young countryman, his knowledge that “of his three score years and ten, twenty will not come again” as well as his joy in the “cherry hung with snow.” The next three poems in this selection show the development of the narrator in love, but always with an undertone of things coming to an end. He gives advice, “Think no more Lad, laugh, be jolly; why should men haste to die?” Jerome Knox takes over on stage for the two songs specifically about war, firstly ‘Lads in their Hundreds’, the longest and, in its repeated verse structure, the most folk-like of the songs. After celebrating the participants of the Ludlow Fair, the final line in each verse points out how many will die young: “the lads that will die in their glory and never grow old.” The final song, ‘Is my Team Ploughing?’ is about an individual tragedy. With pared-down plangent accompaniment, we hear four questions from a dead soldier to his living friend. After Knox’s first question about the farm, Williams leaps to his feet to answer. The song, usually sung by a soloist, gains from this format. The dead man moves chillingly to the questions about his former sweetheart and then about his friend’s welfare. The friend’s final admission is that he “cheers a dead man’s sweetheart, never ask me whose.” It’s a conclusion almost as shocking as the end of Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting: “I am the enemy you killed my friend….” That poem and Britten’s War Requiem concluding music suggest consolation after the shock, with the repetition of “Let us sleep now.” The Butterfield song with the singer’s last note left in the air and the questioning piano phrase gives no such certainty.
To read the press release in full, please click here to view the article on The Edinburgh Music Review website.
