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Track(s) taken from CDA67168

Two English Folksongs

composer
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
1913
author of text
Anonymous - traditional
Folksongs from Sussex

John Mark Ainsley (tenor), The Nash Ensemble, Leo Phillips (violin)
Recording details: October 1999
All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Antony Howell & Julian Millard
Release date: September 2000
Total duration: 4 minutes 22 seconds
 

Reviews

‘John Mark Ainsley's performance is among his best on record in these austerely beautiful, imaginatively scored settings’ (Gramophone)

‘It would be hard to find an interpreter more beautifully suited to the Blake Songs than John Mark Ainsley’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘Superbly sung. A warm recommendation’ (International Record Review)

‘John Mark Ainsley’s voice has exactly the right timbre for this music. First-rate. A most desirable disc. Very strongly recommended’ (Fanfare, USA)

‘Hyperion could have no better champion here than John Mark Ainsley. With beautifully sensitive playing from the Nash Ensemble, his clean, mellifluous tenor draws us in to the hidden riches of this marvellous music’ (Amazon.co.uk)
1913 saw Vaughan Williams’s settings of the Two English Folksongs ‘Searching for lambs’ and ‘The Lawyer’—the latter having just appeared in Butterworth’s collection of Folksongs from Sussex. Both are in the key of A modal minor, and both are examples of the supreme sensitivity Vaughan Williams always showed when providing an effective setting for the folksongs he loved.

from notes by Michael Hurd © 2000

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