Maconchy & Vaughan Williams: Songs, Vol. 1

Contents

Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel

I. The Vagabond

II. Let Beauty Awake

III. The Roadside Fire

IV. Youth and Love

V. In Dreams

VI. The Infinite Shining Heavens

VII. Whither Must I Wander?

VIII. Bright is the Ring of Words

VIII. I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope

Maconchy:

Love Stood At My Door

The Bee-Sting

Vaughan Williams: The Woodspurge

Maconchy:

The Cloths of Heaven

The Thrush

Impetuous Heart, Be Still

Vaughan Williams: Four Poems by Fredegond Shove

I. Motion and Stillness

II. Four Nights

III. The New Ghost

IV. The Water Mill

Maconchy: Faustus

The first of two releases to mark the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth presents two of his major song collections, while bringing to light a substantial number of songs by the composer’s student Elizabeth Maconchy. Her works here are almost all unpublished and virtually unknown since their original first performances from manuscript, and span several decades of the composer’s career from the time of her studies with Vaughan Williams in the mid-1920s though to her committed espousal of the British modernist aesthetic by the 1960s and 70s. The songs are performed by tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley in this continuation of their long-standing partnership.