Alexander Young in Peter Warlock Songs

I wrote in early 2009 about Alexander Young's recording of Vaughan Williams' settings of poems from Housman's "A Shropshire Lad". I mentioned that work's influence on Peter Warlock's 1920-22 setting of works by William Butler Yeats, "The Curlew". Today we have Young's recording of that setting, together with a fine selection of other songs by the same composer.

As in the previous record, Young is accompanied by the Sebastian String Quartet and pianist Gordon Watson. Lionel Solomon (flute) and Peter Graeme (English horn) are heard on "The Curlew." As before, the recordings originate with Argo and are from slightly later American Westminster pressings.

Alexander Young

Peter Warlock, a pseudonym for Philip Heseltine, mainly wrote songs during his short life, which ended in what is most likely suicide at age 36. He is lightly regarded as a composer - possibly because he was a miniaturist, but his songs are of a very high standard. "The Curlew" cycle is his masterpiece, his music fitting extraordinary well to Yeats' bleak poetry. ("No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; the boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.") But the composer responds just as strongly to joyful verse such as the Shakespeare setting "Pretty Ring Time." This dual aspect of Heseltine's work is sometimes thought to express the dual Heseltine/Warlock identity.

Young is the right artist for this work; he encompasses all its facets beautifully, and the other musicians also are excellent. As is standard for Argo recordings of this vintage (1953), the voice is backwardly balanced.

The Argo cover is above; scans of the inappropriate Westminster cover (of Big Ben!) and texts are included in the download.

I have Young's recording of Roger Quilter songs somewhere and will transfer it when I find it.

LINK to June 2025 remastering in ambient stereo

On Wenlock Edge

On Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams' setting of Housman for tenor, string quartet, and piano, is one of the seminal works of 20th century English music. Both composer and poet are associated with pastoralism, although that is a simplistic way of categorizing both men's work.

Housman published A Shropshire Lad in 1896 and Vaughan Williams set several poems from it in 1909. The sense of yearning for something lost that permeates the words and music is beyond nostalgia, for there is little pleasant about it; it is marked by death.

When war broke out soon after Vaughan Williams' composition was published, the music seemed to capture the sense that the world had changed irrevocably. It was influential among other English composers - directly so for composer and war poet Ivor Gurney, who himself set poems from A Shropshire Lad after hearing Vaughan Williams' work. Another was Peter Warlock, whose Yeats setting, The Curlew, rivals Vaughan Williams for memorability.

The Vaughan Williams has been recorded many times, especially in recent years. In contrast, when this version came out in 1953, it was the first LP issue, or so I believe. It has not been reissued. The tenor is the very fine Alexander Young; I am much more favorable about his work than was The Gramophone's Alec Robertson, in a perceptive contemporary review that is included in the download.

The other side of the LP was taken up by seven songs from Vaughan Williams' staged setting of The Pilgrim's Progress, which had only recently been completed. These songs with piano accompaniment are variants of the music in the staged version, and have not been otherwise recorded, to my knowledge.

The contemporary Argo ad (below) touts the quality of the sound, but Robertson in his review complains about it. The critic is right - the strings are steely and the sound gets congested at fortes. I have tamed the steeliness, but some congestion remains. The voices are backwardly balanced, unusually.

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