A Shropshire Lad

Review: A brainy evening spotlights British composers and poets

Britten’s settings of Blake were the meatiest part of the program. The composer’s partner, Peter Pears, selected and arranged the texts from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and other writings; arguably, his sequencing contributes as much to the song cycle’s success as Britten’s masterful musical settings. The seven poems and seven proverbs are performed without pause, and thus pack a potent emotional and intellectual punch. Baritone Michael Chipman and pianist Jason Hardink gave a perceptive, highly involving performance. Their collaboration on “A Poison Tree” and “The Tyger” was especially gripping.

The concert opened with “On Wenlock Edge,” one of Vaughan Williams’ earliest hits. The song cycle shows a more pronounced French influence than the composer’s more mature works, but there are still some vivid glimpses into the English countryside. Tenor Brian Stucki sang with youthful freshness, tempered with an appealing dark edge. Violinists Stephanie Cathcart and Tina Johnson, violist Julie Edwards, cellist Kevin Shumway and pianist Jed Moss gave cleanly phrased and nicely shaded accompaniment.

The other Vaughan Williams work on the program, the Piano Quintet, dates from so early in the composer’s career that it’s barely recognizable as Vaughan Williams (a passage for strings early in the first movement is one of the few hints). It’s a pleasant enough work, performed persuasively by the well-balanced and well-rehearsed ensemble of Cathcart, Edwards, Shumway, Moss and bassist Jamie Allyn.

A Shropshire Lad (unabridged)

, A.E. Housman recreates a nostalgic world of lost love, lost youth, thwarted friendships, unfaithful girls, male bonding, untimely death and the uncertain glories of being a soldier. The poems deal with the exuberance of youth – its aspirations and disappointments, its naïve certainties and tragic mistakes. Though written in 1895, it struck a chord with the generation of young men who fought in World War I. It was said that every ‘Tommy’ had a copy in his knapsack. It has never been out of print. Find out more about A Shropshire Lad was in fact not written in a rural retreat at all, but many miles from the ‘blue-remembered hills’, in Highgate, London. When he could not find a publisher, Housman had the collection privately printed in 1895. Though not an immediate success, by 1898 the melancholic and nostalgic tone of the poems had struck a chord with the Victorian public, who were feeling that the 1890s had marked the end of a glorious era, and the beginning of an uncertain future. Themes of lost love, lost youth and early death suited the Victorians’ inclination for morbidity exactly. But the theme of A Shropshire Lad that was to strike a chord with the next generation, so many of whose young men were to die on the battlefields of Flanders, was the militarism that recurs throughout the poems. Housman’s youngest brother Herbert had enlisted in 1889, and died in the Boer War in 1900. He was the model for the young men in Housman’s poems who become soldiers, recklessly seeking death and glory in war.