Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On
The King’s Singers
Victoria Meteyard (soprano), Grace Davidson (soprano)
rec. 2024, St Nicholas’ Church, Kemerton, UK
Sung texts, English translations of the non-English songs
Signum Classics SIGCD887 [63]
The title of this album is a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and can be found in the second of Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs (track 8). The background for the album is explained in Clive Paget’s liner notes:
“What is an artist to do when facing the inhumanity and horror of war? The instinct for some is to tackle it head on. For others, however, there are lessons to be learned and comfort to be taken from a magical and otherworldly past. This album, in essence, wrestles with the tension between the two, comparing the response from some of the composers who fought with those who stayed at home.
The First World War didn’t just decimate a whole generation; those who survived were shaken to their very cores. A great deal of music and poetry of the time expresses a sense of lives wasted. Others, however, chose to reflect and deflect, conjuring enigmatic images of a bygone pastoral age.”
The contents of this disc focus mainly on WW1 and the time immediately preceding it but with flashbacks to earlier eras. The liner notes elaborates further various composers’ personal reactions, and I warmly recommend them to readers.
It goes without saying that much of the music is subdued, even lugubrious, but that doesn’t mean that it is repulsive. There is a specific beauty in death and sorrow. Some of the most beautiful music can be found in requiems. Many of the texts are also old-fashioned, or rather timeless. The calm and beautiful Nachtlied is a setting of a text by a 16th century theologian, a soothing prayer for the dead. Reger’s intention was to compose a requiem for the victims of the war, but his health was precarious, and he ended up with eight sacred songs, of which this is the third. It was published in 1916, when Reger had already died from a heart-attack.
The next group of songs, Debussy’s Trois Chansons from 1908, is based on even older texts, by Charles, Duke of Orleans, who lived in the 15th century. Composed a half-dozen years before the outbreak of the war, he could be more light-hearted in two of the songs. The second is a jolly spring song, brightly dancing, and in the third, the poet compares the four seasons in generally positive terms – but not the winter: Winter is nothing but a rogue!
An interesting surprise was Schubert’s Flucht, an appeal for freedom, which is a timely reminder of the repression so many people suffer from. Brahms’s beautiful and Schubertian Vineta similarly describes a threat to freedom. Wilhelm Müller, whose Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin Schubert set so memorably, wrote the text about a sunken city and the Lorelei-like forces which entice mariners into the depths. One can hear the sounds of bells down there. Bells are also heard in the first of Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs. He was deeply engaged during WW1 as a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, where at Arras in 1915 as a wagon orderly he ferried the sick and wounded in a field ambulance. His experiences during the war so strongly affected his creativity that only well into the 1920s could he resume his composing. The Shakespeare songs were not written until 1951, when he was 78, as test pieces, and they are far from easy. The relation to war is, if anything, to WW2 and the echoes of his sixth symphony, composed during and immediately after the war and premiered in 1948. The dramatic character and the dissonant harmonies, led listeners to regard it as his war symphony, which he eventually agreed with a reference to the quotation from The Tempest mentioned above. The choral pieces, which were composed close in time to his revision of the symphony, are certainly characterized by a sense of doom – the first two that is; the third with a text from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is cheerful and lively. So also is Camille Saint-Saëns’s Saltarella:rhythmic and with a positive attitude to life.
Elgar was deeply engaged in the war activities, but too old to take active part. Death on the Hills was composed the same year the war broke out, and is implacably gloomy, but beautiful. The Epitaph Owls, written several years earlier,is even gloomier and harmonically the most advanced music of his I’ve heard. The setting of Lord Byron’s Deep in my Soul adds further to the gloominess. Ravel’s Trois chansons from 1914 come as a relief. On the surface, they are light-hearted and entertaining, even though there is a serious undertone. Each of them I dedicated to a friend “he hoped might support his efforts to enlist”. He tried to join the air force but was turned down and finally became a lorry driver.
The Mendelssohn siblings are represented here by two Romantic pieces. Fanny’s contribution is a calm evening hymn, and Felix’s a setting of Psalm 121 from his oratorio Elijah. Booth are soothing.
Hugo Alfvén was in the forefront during the first decades of the 20th century, but unlike the other countries Sweden was never involved in the war. The only hostile incident was the breakup of the union with Norway in1906, but it never led to any military action. Alfvén was nationalist, and he hailed Swedish folk music, including arrangements for choir of folk songs. Uti vår hage, from the island of Gotland, is one of his best known creations, whether in the versions for mixed choir and male choir. I have sung it in both versions hundreds of times, and I still return to it with pleasure. The lively and rhythmically quite tricky Och jungfrun hon går i ringen is also a favourite, and the only possible war reference here is in the last stanza, when some huntsmen shoot at a nasty rapist. Herman Sätherberg’s evening song Aftonen is one of the finest descriptions of nature in the Swedish choral literature.
We return to Vaughan Williams; the motet Valiant-for-Truth from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, describes Valiant-for-Truth’s arrival into the Celestial City, receiving a jubilant welcome. It was composed in 1942, in the middle of WW2. Finally, we move to Finland, which before WW1 still was a grand duchy under Russia, but towards the end of the nineties there was strong opposition to Russian rule; Sibelius supported this with his tone poem Finlandia, which found enormous popularity in Finland and became a symbol of the fight for freedom. Towards the end of the war, Finland could proclaim its autonomy, and Sibelius arranged the hymn for choirs. It has since become a Lutheran hymn, also sung abroad. It makes a suitable, optimistic end to this touching programme.
I have so far only commented on the actual music, but the singing itself is also worth analysis. The music here was originally intended for choirs, often with fifty or more singers. That means that unavoidably the sound picture becomes evened out – “mushier”, to be blunt. With only one voice per part the sound is more distinct, thinner in a way, but you can separate parts from each other more clearly. The King’s Singers have become famous for their precision in the more than fifty years of their existence, and that quality is just as obvious in their new guise with two sopranos added. For me, having been a chorist for almost sixty years – admittedly on a very amateurish level – singing in small groups is the ultimate challenge, and few groups have mastered this so marvellously well as the King’s Singers. That this disc is a further feather in their already well-adorned caps, I am sure their many admirers will agree.
Göran Forsling
Previous review: Ralph Moore (April 2025)
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Contents
Reger: Nachtlied, Op. 138, No. 3
Debussy: Trois chansons de Charles d’Orléans
I. Dieu! Qui l’a fait bon regarder
II. Quant j’ai ouy le tabourin
III. Yver, vous n’estes qu’un villain
Schubert: Flucht, D825b
Brahms: Vineta, Op. 42 No. 2
Vaughan Williams: Three Shakespeare Songs
Grace Davidson (soprano), Victoria Meteyard (soprano)
I. Full fathom five
II. The cloud-capp’d towers
III. Over hill, over dale
Saint-Saëns: Saltarelle Op. 74
Elgar: Death on the Hills, Op. 72
Excerpt, Elgar: Four Part-songs Op. 53
No. 2, Owls
No. 3, Deep in my soul
Ravel: Trois chansons, M69
I. Nicolette
II. Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis
III. Ronde
Mendelssohn, Fanny: Gartenlieder, Op. 3: No. 3, Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald
Mendelssohn, Felix: Hebe deine Augen auf zu den Bergen
Alfvén: Uti vår hage (Text: Folk-song from Gotland)
Alfvén: Och jungfrun hon går i ringen (Text: Swedish Dance)
Alfvén: Aftonen
Vaughan Williams: Valiant-for-Truth
Sibelius: Be still, my soul (Finlandia, Op. 26) [Arr. for vocal ensemble by Nick Ashby]
