Soloistsduke 4tet - WARLOCK: The Curlew / Lillygay / Peterisms / Saudades [CD]

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Peter Warlock (1894-1930)The Curlew • Lillygay • Peterisms, Sets 1 and 2 • SaudadesIn a letter of 1919 to Bernard van Dieren, a composer whom he greatly admired, Philip Heseltine explained how he had submitted a group of songs to the publisher Winthrop Rogers under the pseudonym of Peter Warlock, having failed to find a publisher under his own name. The ruse was soon revealed, but not before distinguished singers of the time had started to take an interest in them. Born in London in 1894, Heseltine had been encouraged in his musical enthusiasms during his time at school, latterly at Eton. There followed an introduction to Delius, who continued to show an interest in his work, and after study in Germany and a year at Oxford reading Classics, he turned his attention to the study of earlier English music, although himself without formal musical training. As a pacifist, in any case medically unfit for military service, he spent the war years in Cornwall and then in Ireland, before returning to London, the centre of his later activities, broken by a period with his mother in Wales and a time in Kent. A certain instability of character, evident, perhaps, in the dual Heseltine/Warlock identities, has been attributed in part to the early death of his father in 1896. Peter Warlock died in December 1930 of gas poisoning, whether by accident or suicide. Warlock is remembered in particular for his Capriol Suite, an attractive reworking for string orchestra of French dance music of the sixteenth century, also arranged for piano duet and fuller orchestra. A number of his carols have a firm place in Christmas choral repertoire, while his many songs form a remarkable body of work, influenced by Delius, Van Dieren, and the Elizabethan and Jacobean composers that had formed the core of his musicological studies as Philip Heseltine. The group of settings of poems by W.B.Yeats, The Curlew, written between 1920 and 1922, is scored for tenor, with flute, cor anglais and string quartet. The four songs are interrupted by an Interlude, and the first starts after an evocative introduction, with the cries of the curlew and peewit represented by the flute and cor anglais. The cycle reflects the mood of the poems. Lillygay is a 1922 cycle of five songs, of which three are here included. The poems are drawn from an anthology by Victor Neuburg and the settings are accompanied by the piano, settings of seeming simplicity in their technical perfection, the best examples of English song-writing of the period, ending with the lively Rantum Tantum. A similar mood is continued in Peter Warlock’s Fancy, a setting of 1924. The two sets of so-called Peterisms were written in 1922. The first three songs are settings of verses by George Peele, John Fletcher and possibly by John Skelton. The lively first song, Chopcherry, a reference to the game of catching a hanging cherry in the mouth, in the manner of bob-apple, is in great contrast with the sad lamen

The curlew

Lillygay

Peter Warlock's fancy

Peterisms, first set

My gostly fader

Bright is the ring of words

Saudades

The cloths of heaven

The frostbound wood

Bethlehem down

Sweet and twenty

And wilt thou leave me thus?

Mr Belloc's fancy

Peterisms, second set

The bachelor

Away to Twiver

Captain Stratton's fancy