Lennox Berkeley is often the designated twentieth century composer on collections of choral music by English cathedral choirs, but his songs are a good deal less well known. There are no fewer than five recording premieres here, and any one of them could supply worthwhile material to a singer's repertoire. The disc surveys
Berkeley's entire song-composing career, beginning with student works in French written before and during his stint studying in Paris with the pedagogue
Nadia Boulanger. (
Berkeley was of partly French background, spoke the language fluently, and continued to write songs in French after this period.) The program runs forward chronologically to one of
Berkeley's last works, the French-language Sonnet, Op. 102, of 1982, written when
Berkeley was 79 and dedicated to the 106-year-old singer
Hugues Cuénod. Annotator Tony Scotland finds signs of
Berkeley's encroaching Alzheimer's disease in this little song, but it's certainly very moving and may well be of interest to researchers studying the dreaded disorder. In between are pieces influenced by
Britten and a dissonant idiom of the 1950s and 1960s more distinctive to
Berkeley himself. But no matter what his musical vocabulary, there is a recognizable thread common to all the songs on the album. It is very economical poems that showcase
Berkeley's precise gestures at their best --
Cocteau (sample the little portrait of Narcissus, track 4, who is, as a joke, turned inside out by Death "like the finger of a glove"), W.H. Auden, Robert Herrick, and a marvelous group of settings of Chinese poems in translations drawn from common English anthologies. Tenor
James Gilchrist is an ideal exponent of these songs: he is delicate, attuned to the chamber atmosphere of the British song repertory, and admirably precise. With Chandos' usual high engineering standards -- Suffolk's Potton Hall is the perfect venue -- this release is essential for lovers of art song in the twentieth century. Song texts are in English and, where necessary, French; the informative booklet notes by Scotland are in English only.