Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.
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Britten’s biographer Paul Kildea notes that Britten composed Winter Words in the ‘downtime’ between completing his opera Gloriana and the beginning of its rehearsal period. While most of us might reasonably take a holiday in such circumstances, Britten chose to write a song cycle which ponders the nature of human existence. It is not a sombre, heavyweight work, however. Most of the songs depict brief scenes or moments in time, pithily evoked by Hardy, and wonderfully illustrated by Britten. It is no coincidence that by this stage in his life the composer was the veteran of six stage works.
Some of the ‘scenes’ are lightly ironic, such as ‘Wagtail and Baby’, with its wry observations on man’s intrusion into the natural world, and its gentle imitation of birdsong in the piano. More birdsong is found in ‘Proud Songsters’, while furniture creaks in ‘The Old Table,’ and both demonstrate the very Hardy-ish themes of time passing, and the potency of memory. Hardy was also fascinated, if disturbed, by the arrival of the railway lines. He was disconcerted by the speed at which remote locations could be connected, sensing that it might adversely affect the ‘natural’ tempo of life. In two songs here, the railways are linked more specifically to the speed of growing up, depicting two vulnerable boys alone in the world far too soon. In ‘Midnight on the Great Western’ Britten cleverly imitates the ‘Doppler effect’ in his opening piano motif, followed by a jolting, halting rhythm as the train bumps along the tracks. The music fades into the background as the gentleman in the carriage contemplates the lad in front of him, and wonders what his story might be. ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ finds a young fiddler, busking for his supper, in brief comradeship with a convict on the station platform. Here, the piano resembles the sounds of a violin, initially warming up on the open strings.
Planted more or less centrally in the cycle, ‘The Choirmaster’s Burial’ is a beautiful and haunting (in several senses) tale-within-a-tale. Within a few bars we hear the hymn tune ‘Mount Ephraim’, the favourite of the choirmaster, who had requested it at his funeral. An unimaginative vicar—treated to some unflatteringly four-square music—refuses; but later on witnesses ‘a band all in white’ playing music by the choirmaster’s grave. The cycle is framed by two songs with a more philosophical than dramatic flavour. Wintery flurries and agitated harmonies dominate the opening song, yet both voice and piano return frequently to a unison ‘D’, suggestive of what remains constant, even if time and life have moved on. The final song, with its anguished, repeated cry of ‘how long?’, feels like an existential question by the end of the cycle. The visceral experience of living, with its sorrows and pleasures, is both the gift and the heavy burden of consciousness.
Imogen Holst’s Four Songs were written at Dartington in Devon, where Holst had originally gone to recuperate after several years of exhausting wartime activity working for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). Being Imogen Holst—and sharing an impressive work ethic with Britten—she also helped set up and run a music training course.
The set was composed for soprano Mary Williams, who had been one of Holst’s students, and the texts were taken from Tottel’s Miscellany published in 1557. In each song, Holst deploys a small rhythmic ‘cell’ in the piano part, sometimes repeated, but more often subtly altered as the song progresses. The vocal line is generally syllabic, even conversational, allowing the characterful verses to speak for themselves. In the first song, the most prominent ‘cell’ comprises two quavers, followed by a rest, often heard at the start of a bar. The voice frequently echoes this figure, giving the setting a suitably ‘brittle,’ halting quality. In the second, suggestive of internal disquiet, the piano ‘tolls’ ominously, before expanding into a somewhat spiky, off-kilter figure. The tolling fades disconcertingly into nothingness at the end. Turbulence is generated very effectively in the third song, with its dry moto perpetuo in the piano, and the voice breaking out into wide leaps, occasionally subsiding into humming. Flurries of triplets early in the song (initially with the words ‘So dumb’) reveal themselves to be strikes of the clock, which ‘call for death’. In the sombre final song, the piano murmurs in a monotone ‘cell’ throughout, oblivious to the chromatic shifts and ‘torment’ above.
Holst’s ‘Little think’st thou’, composed a few years earlier, has a simple accompaniment and a gentle, walking rhythm. The mood is melancholy, with some responsive peaks in the vocal line, and sets the quietly devastating first two verses of Donne’s poem; Holst chooses to stop before its considerably more worldly final stanzas. Finally ‘Weathers’ is from earlier in Holst’s life, written when she was only nineteen. In a rolling, dance-like rhythm it resembles a Renaissance lute song and captures beautifully the poem’s time-out-of-time depiction of men, women and other creatures at one with the changing seasons. The minor mode, and solitary ‘so do I’ towards the end, hints at the brevity of it all.
Daniel Kidane’s Songs of Illumination is a setting of three poems of William Blake, performed without pause. The poems are told from the point of view of the vulnerable (children, tiny insects, or the otherwise ignored or marginalised), their separation from parental figures, particularly mothers, and the powerful effect of dreams and visions on their emotional state. Dreams are places of compassion and refuge in the first two poems: the first (‘A Dream’ from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, a collection first published in 1789) describes a helpful community of insects (a glow-worm and a beetle guiding the mother ant home); the second, heartbreakingly, reveals ‘The Land of Dreams’ where a child’s mother is still alive, and where the child prefers to remain. The vision of heaven in the final song (‘The Little Black Boy’ from Songs of Innocence) aspires to a colour-blind utopia, where ‘I from black and he from white cloud free’.
Over the course of the cycle the piano moves from initial growls and rumbles—the landscape of the earthbound mother ‘Emmet’ (or ant)—to the celestial ‘tent of God’ in the final song, high up on the keyboard. The voice, dreamlike and sighing in the opening song, finds itself anchored in thirds (minor and major), particularly between F and D, which heralds the return of the mother ant (‘Little wanderer hie thee home’) and later sings of souls, and of standing at God’s knee. Often high in its register, the vocal line travels from the dramatic contours of the first song, to the unease and sorrow of the child’s ‘land of dreams’, to a lullaby-like softness by the end. Indeed, the bereaved child hands over its vocal line at the end of Song II to form the material of the final number. This poem, full of good intentions, nonetheless contains troubling assumptions about the supposed differences between black and white bodies. Yet it yearns for unity and equality. Fittingly, the voice and piano—often separated through discord, or flung to opposite ends of the musical register—find themselves in the same musical world in the final bars.
Britten’s approach to folk song was not that of an ethnographer, or ‘collector’. He could be scathing about what he called the ‘folk-art problem’ (in an article written in 1941) suspicious of any hint of nationalism and believing many folk melodies to be amiable, but inherently weak. However, he clearly managed to overcome his misgivings, and produced seven volumes of folk song arrangements over the next thirty or so years, embracing melodies from across the British Isles as well as Ireland, France and Appalachia. His approach was to present the melodies unchanged and up front, yet to take considerable artistic licence with the accompaniment, sometimes to quite radical effect.
‘Sally in our alley’ is largely a straightforward setting, though the more complex piano introduction and interludes suggest a very different life beyond ‘the alley’. ‘The plough boy’ is perhaps one of the most conventional adaptation in this group, the opening piano figure suggestive of the lad’s ‘whistle’, while octaves in the bass evoke the imagined grandeur of what may come to pass. ‘The last rose of summer,’ meanwhile, plants the soaring Irish melody in a rapturous, almost epic environment, with rippling ‘harps’ and dramatic octave builds. In ‘How sweet the answer’ the piano gently provides the ‘echoes’ and ‘answers’, while also injecting some disconcerting harmonies between the verses. ‘Ca’ the yowes’ has a dreamlike quality to its verses, contrasting with the richly harmonised chorus. Finally, ‘Oliver Cromwell’ is an eccentric little number, over in less than a minute, and something of a tongue-twisting gallop for the voice. Britten and Peter Pears would frequently use it as an encore, and it is easy to understand why.
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Nick Pritchard and Ian Tindale © 2025