James Geer & Ronald Woodley - Dreams Melting (2021) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce Dreams Melting, a revealing survey of British songs from the early 20th century by tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley.

At the recital’s heart are two substantial cycles. Setting seven poems by Thomas Hardy, Gerald Finzi’s Till Earth Outwears provides an intimate and movingly melancholic commentary in what Ronald Woodley describes in his extensive and informative booklet notes as a “male perspective on life, love and loss”.

Rarely recorded, Howard Ferguson’s five-part treatment of Denton Welch’s poems, Discovery, typifies “the subtlety of the relationship between late romanticism, modernism and the inherited idioms of ‘Britishness’ that composers of Ferguson’s generation inevitably grew up with”. Its second song, ‘Dreams Melting’, provides the recital’s title.

Three songs make their first appearance on disc. Elizabeth Maconchy’s setting of John Donne’s passionate but tortured A Hymn to God the Father boasts a searching vocal line underpinned by tellingly interrogative piano. Phyllis Tate’s The Falcon is a sparse but powerful setting of an anonymous medieval text while her variegated treatment of William Blake’s poem Cradle Song is reminiscent of a Bartók folksong arrangement.

Also heard are Maconchy’s Four Shakespeare Songs and settings of Ben Jonson’s Have You Seen but a Bright Lily Grow? and Robert Herrick’s A Meditation for his Mistress, alongside six varied and vital songs by Rebecca Clarke, including The Seal Man, “one of her most soaring flights of imagination”, and Tate’s Epitaph, in which her “quietly understated writing is masterly”.

A compendium of songs by William Walton and Constant Lambert, Façades (SOMMCD 0614), James Geer and Ronald Woodley’s debut SOMM release (with pianist Andrew West) was hailed by The Telegraph as “a wonderful collection of beautifully crafted miniatures”. MusicWeb International declared it “an absolute gem of a disc in every regard” and awarded it a Recording of the Year accolade.

Tracklist:
01. Ferguson: Discovery, Op. 13: No. 1, Dreams Melting
02. Ferguson: Discovery, Op. 13: No. 2, The Freedom of the City
03. Ferguson: Discovery, Op. 13: No. 3, Babylon
04. Ferguson: Discovery, Op. 13: No. 4, Jane Allen
05. Ferguson: Discovery, Op. 13: No. 5, Discovery
06. Clarke: The Seal Man
07. Clarke: The Cloths of Heaven
08. Clarke: The Cherry-Blossom Wand
09. Clarke: Infant Joy
10. Clarke: Cradle Song
11. Clarke: Tiger, Tiger
12. Maconchy: 3 Donne Songs: No. 1, A Hymn to God the Father
13. Maconchy: Have You Seen but a Bright Lily Grow?
14. Maconchy: A Meditation for His Mistress
15. Finzi: Till Earth Outwears, Op. 19a: No. 1, Let Me Enjoy the Earth
16. Finzi: Till Earth Outwears, Op. 19a: No. 2, In Years Defaced
17. Finzi: Till Earth Outwears, Op. 19a: No. 3, The Market Girl
18. Finzi: Till Earth Outwears, Op. 19a: No. 4, I Look Into My Glass
19. Finzi: Till Earth Outwears, Op. 19a: No. 5, It Never Looks Like Summer
20. Finzi: Till Earth Outwears, Op. 19a: No. 6, At a Lunar Eclipse
21. Finzi: Till Earth Outwears, Op. 19a: No. 7, Life Laughs Onward
22. Maconchy: 4 Shakespeare Songs: No. 1, Come Away, Death
23. Maconchy: 4 Shakespeare Songs: No. 2, The Wind and the Rain
24. Maconchy: 4 Shakespeare Songs: No. 3, Take, O Take Those Lips Away
25. Maconchy: 4 Shakespeare Songs: No. 4, King Stephen
26. Tate: 2 Songs: No. 2, The Falcon
27. Tate: Cradle Song
28. Tate: Epitaph


Thanks to the Original customer!