The New Winter Songbook
Rebecca Lea (soprano), Caroline Jaya-Ratnam (piano)
rec. 2025, St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, London, UK
Texts available from Convivium’s website
Convivium Records CR114 [92]

This is a collection of twenty-one new (or recent) songs that focus on winter. Most are secular but some are religious and all have been published as a collection by Hal Leonard. The composers offer an engaging variety of responses to the material, whether melancholic or more joyous, and whilst it’s doubtless invidious to highlight the better-known of them, I ought to mention Errollyn Wallen, Judith Weir, Cecilia McDowell, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Owain Park and James Weeks.

Most of the settings are compact but not unduly so – the shortest is two-minutes – whilst the most extended is Owain Park’s Winters Distant, at eight minutes. All have interesting features, descriptive, structural, sonic or otherwise. For example, Jamie W Hall’s Dust of Snow encodes drizzle effects. One of the most psychologically interesting is Ben Nobuto’s Sundowning, which seems initially playful but on closer listening, conveys the disorientation of a dementia sufferer, the music endlessly returning in on itself with small changes of emphases, the singer quoting fragments from the film It’s a Wonderful Life. It ends with a quiet, reflective, kind-of resolution. It put me in mind of the upsetting, moving closing scene of the film, The Father.

Héloïse Werner’s Winter Spell, set in her native French as well as her adopted English, is strangely compelling – initially spare, increasingly expressive – whilst Adam Gorb’s setting of Frost Fair, complete with bell imitations and a rather Britten-ish feel, is rather frenetic. Much different – and this reflects the many divergent twists the disc takes – is the religious setting of Eoghan Desmond called The Darkest Midnight whose archaisms pay tribute to its Irish traditional nature. McDowall takes a John Masefield poem called Christmas Eve at Sea and treats it supply, with apt and evocative piano commentaries. Blake’s Cradle Song offers Helen Neeves the opportunity for quietly compressed intensity of feeling and Hilaire Belloc’s Twelfth Night gives Martin Bussey the chance of considerable expressive variety – from unexpectedly heated outburst to the frozen weather with dappled icy sonorities from the piano      

Judith Weir sets Japanese haiku, and Sun Keting sets The Nineteenth Night of December by the Chinese writer, Fei Ming, translated into English, with spare but resonant feeling and the subtlest of Chinese inflexions. Wallen’s North becomes increasingly ardent as it develops, Electra Perivolaris reflects on her two cultural identities, David McGregor explores romantic longing in Ariadne whilst Michael Csanyi-Wills generates melancholic lyricism in his fine setting, Snow Drop. Owain Park’s long setting is slow, precise and enshrines veiled melancholy. A couple of the settings in the two discs came about as a result of workshopping and one such is Anita Datta’s Seasonal Clothing, a narratively entertaining and openly expressive setting with a touch of the folkloric about it.      

You’ll need to scan the QR code in the card fold-out to access the notes and song texts, which might prove irksome, but it all worked fine for me and, I daresay, keeps down costs.  

Rebecca Lee is the intrepid soprano who navigates these twenty-one songs with unflinching commitment accompanied by the excellent pianist, Caroline Jaya-Ratnam. I’m sure some of these songs will appeal more than others and perhaps a few not at all, but that’s the challenge of building new repertoire, not least for the Christmas season.

Jonathan Woolf

Contents
Jamie W. Hall – Dust of Snow 
Errollyn Wallen – North
Judith Weir – On White Meadows
Ben Nobuto – Sundowning 
Héloïse Werner – Winter Spell 
Adam Gorb – Frost Fair 
Eoghan Desmond – The Darkest Midnight 
Jessica Dannheisser – Winter Fragments
Cecilia McDowall – Christmas Eve at Sea 
Helen Neeves – Cradle Song
James Weeks – Natural State 
Martin Bussey – Twelfth Night 
Cheryl Frances-Hoad – The Core of Time
Peter Foggitt – Villanelle: New Year’s Eve-
Electra Perivolaris – Lethe – Oblivion
Michael Betteridge – Snow Day 
David McGregor – Ariadne 
Michael Csanyi-Wills – Snow Drop 
Sun Keting – The Nineteenth Night of December 
Owain Park – Winters Distant 
Anita Datta – Seasonal Clothing