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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