Maconchy • Vaughan Williams Songs, Vol. 2: Maconchy: The Garland; How Samson Bore Away the Gates of Gaza; The Exequy etc; Vaughan Williams: The House of Life; Four Last Songs James Geer (tenor), Ronald Woodley (piano) Resonus RES10317 77:22 mins
The final instalment of Resonus’s two-part parade of songs by Vaughan Williams and his sometime pupil Elizabeth Maconchy offers as much food for thought and delight as its predecessor. VW’s two song sets – one early, one late – comfort the ear more regularly than Maconchy’s harder, less familiar creations, some of them unearthed among archive manuscripts during the performers’ research. But whatever the music, the forthright and sympathetic approach of tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley always makes listening a pleasure.
Geer means and feels every word he sings. His immense care over diction is especially necessary in The House of Life, VW’s florid early setting of equally elaborate poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. How crisply he separates the inner consonants in the word ‘kingcup’; how easily he tosses off ‘hautboy’ and ‘gonfalon’.
Nor is he discomfited by Vachel Lindsay’s period Americana, though the troubadour poet’s ‘How Samson Bore Away the Gates of Gaza’ is a decidedly odd choice of text for Maconchy. She’s at her considerable best, though, in ‘The Exequy’, a starkly powerful 1956 setting of death-haunted lines by John Donne’s contemporary, Henry King. The gentler observations of the Greek cycle The Garlandalso appeal. VW, meanwhile, shines most strongly and personally in the limpid Four Last Songs, drawn from poems by Ursula Wood, his eventually second wife. Through it all, Woodley’s accompaniments give Geer and the music exactly the support each song requires.
Geoff Brown