Silent Noon, one of Vaughan Williams’s best-loved solo songs, dates from c1902 and was one of six settings of sonnets from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life. The song cycle in its entirety was performed by Edith Clegg and Hamilton Harty at Bechstein Hall on 2 December 1904, but Silent Noon was heard some time earlier when it was sung by Francis Harford at St James’s Hall on 10 March 1903. Rossetti’s voluptuous language is matched by a sonorous, expansive melody which, with its affecting diatonicism, still shows Vaughan Williams under the spell of Parry, but the modulation into the more tonally fluid central paragraph at ‘All round our nest’ shows a post-Wagnerian awareness of new tonal possibilities. The return of the opening melody (‘Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower’) and the home key is a moment of great beauty and emotional power which is matched by the hushed intensity of the closing bars.

from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 2001

Vaughan Williams’s famous song Silent noon needs little explication here; it is a mainstay of the English song repertory and receives many performances, not all of which are equal to the song’s technical challenges. The music dates from 1903 and is the second of the composer’s cycle The house of life to six sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). The poetry collection was published under the same name in 1898. Right from the beginning it was the favourite song of the set by far, and it is rare indeed to hear the piece in the context of the full cycle. Plucked from this rather esoteric cycle of sonnet settings, Vaughan Williams not yet composing in his real voice, it was effortlessly promoted to ballad popularity. As an evocation of the stillness of a hot day deep in the country, the sun at its zenith, it can only be rivalled by Brahms’s Feldeinsamkeit. The composers Ernest Farrar and C W Orr set the poem in later years, which seems a kind of lèse-majesté.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2012