Evening Songs CD
Delius. In the Seraglio Garden. Little Birdie. Love’s Philosophy. Over the Mountains High. Slumber Song. Sunset. Through Long Long Years. With Your Blue Eyes (all arr. Lloyd Webber). Birds in the high Hall-garden (arr. Lloyd Webber/Lenehan/Robert Threlfall). Hassan — Serenade (arr. Eric Fenby). Ireland. Baby. Evening Song. Her Song. Hope. In Summer Woods. Ladslove. Sea Fever. Spring Sorrow. Summer Schemes. The Three Ravens (all arr. Lloyd Webber). The Holy Boy (arr. Ireland).
Julian Lloyd Webber (cello); John Lenehan (piano), with Jiaxin Cheng (cello).
Naxos 8.572902 (super-budget price, 1 hour three minutes). Website www.naxos.com Producer/ Engineer Erdo Groot. Producer Julian Lloyd Webber. Dates September 6th-8th, 2011.
Delius and Ireland both have anniversaries in 2012, and while not obvious bedfellows — I doubt indeed that, despite their dates (1862- 1934 and 1879-1962 respectively) and their temperaments, they were ever acquainted, though of course it is possible, recording them together is a nice idea. The cellist Julian Lloyd Webber is a devotee of both and has in the past recorded both the Delius Cello Concerto and Cello Sonata and also the Ireland Sonata and much of the Ireland chamber repertoire. Now he has had the bright thought of not just setting them alongside each other but of doing so via their songs. Both could almost be called prolific in this area: Ireland wrote over 90, Delius over 60. Yet the catalogue does not teem with recordings thereof.
So Lloyd Webber has borrowed 21 of them for his own instrument, and arranged them accordingly himself, except for three where a cello arrangement was pre-existing. The division is very fair: Ireland has just one more than Delius: they alternate, singly or in pairs, on the disc, a sensible set-up. What emerges – as if we needed reminding — is the great gift of each man for melody: divorced from their texts, which are sometimes embarrassing period pieces, they work almost better in this form (about the only one that doesn’t, oddly, is the inevitable Sea Fever, perhaps because Masefield’s words are so familiar and Ireland’s setting so exact. It feels just a little… baritonal!) If the flavour of the whole, as evidenced by the disc’s overall title ‘Evening Songs’, is slow and nocturnal and languorous, this is surely no matter.
Lloyd Webber is joined by his cellist wife Jiaxin Cheng for a couple of numbers, both by Ireland for women’s voices: they intertwine mellifluously. John Lenehan is the ideal accompanist. The recording is unobtrusively excellent, and there are neat, brief notes by Lyndon Jenkins of the Delius Society and Bruce Phillips of the John Ireland Trust, as well as a paragraph of special pleading by the cellist himself, in which he recalls accidentally encountering a Delius song quite recently and being suddenly struck by the notion of singing it on the cello. (It was Birds in the high Hall-garden from the Tennyson cycle Maud, track 3 on the disc and how right it here sounds.)
Piers Burton-Page
