Composer: Ivor Gurney
Performers: Paul Agnew (tenor), Julius Drake (piano)
Label: Hyperion
Recording details: November 2000
Henry Wood Hall, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Julian Millard
Release date: July 2001
Total duration: 68 minutes 9 seconds
tracklisting:
1 Epitaph in Old Mode ‘The leaves fall gently on the grass’ [3'18]
2 You are my sky [2'14]
3 All night under the moon [4'06]
4 The folly of being comforted [4'42]
5 By a bierside ‘This is a sacred city, built of marvellous earth’ [4'40]
6 Severn Meadows ‘Only the wanderer knows England’s graces’ [1'54]
7 In Flanders ‘I’m homesick for my hills again’ [3'25]
8 Even such is time [3'12]
9 Ha’nacker Mill ‘Sally is gone that was so kindly’ [2'09]
10 Bread and cherries [0'40]
11 Most Holy Night [3'22]
12 Desire in Spring [2'40]
13 Nine of the clock [0'43]
14 A cradle song [2'18]
Five Elizabethan Songs
15 No 1: Orpheus ‘Orpheus with his lute made trees’ [2'24]
16 No 2: Tears ‘Weep you now more, sad fountains’ [3'59]
17 No 3: Under the greenwood tree [1'41]
18 No 4: Sleep ‘Come, sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving’ [3'11]
19 No 5: Spring [2'32]
20 An Epitaph [2'38]
21 The fields are full [1'42]
22 Down by the Salley Gardens [2'29]
23 The cloths of heaven [2'47]
24 The singer [2'40]
25 I will go with my father a-ploughing [2'43]
The life of Ivor Gurney was one of the most tragic in English musical history. A chorister in Gloucester Cathedral Choir at the turn of the century (along with Herbert Howells and Ivor Novello) he was later conscripted into The Great War where he was gassed in the trenches. This experience unhinged his mind and the last few years of his life were spent in an asylum.
Gurney was a prolific poet and the composer of some of the most beautiful songs in the English language, many of which are included on this disc. Some are comparatively well-known (I will go with my father a-ploughing; In Flanders; Down by the Salley Gardens and the five ‘Elizas’); many are not. The moving ‘Severn Meadows’, which gives the disc its title, sets his own nostalgic poem written in the trenches.
This is tenor Paul Agnew’s first solo CD and Julius Drake’s debut on Hyperion
review:
The Independent, by Anna Picard
Ivor Gurney, a composer and poet who survived the First World War and returned to his studies at the Royal College of Music only to degenerate into mental illness, died in 1937 leaving a legacy of 200 songs, one of which, Sleep, has become a classic of English song. Pianist Julius Drake and tenor Paul Agnew’s recital of his clever, vulnerable songs is a masterpiece of sensitivity. Drake’s touch is more defined than ever; a delicate cartography of Gurney’s chromaticism. And Agnew has a warm buttery tone that embraces these songs’ subtle lines. A perceptive reading.