Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Landscapes
Cyrille Dubois (tenor), Anne Le Bozec (piano)
Julien Dieudegard (violin), Emeline Concé (violin), Louise Desjardins (viola), Louis Rodde (cello)
Baptiste Gibier (oboe)
No recording details provided
NoMadMusic NMM129 [2 CDs: 122]

Any newly recorded collection featuring two hours of prime Ralph Vaughan Williams is bound to be celebrated. All the more here, because in this instance the performers are not the usual suspects of British or Anglophone musicians, but instead a group of talented French artists. I would imagine that few of them were that familiar with this repertoire before the project was planned, so the hope must be that they will continue to perform these works in concert too.

Central to the project is the tenor voice of Cyrille Dubois. Looking for any biographical detail in the abject booklet – full texts in English and French and a very brief and superficial introduction to the music by Dubois is literally all there is – does not help at all. Online sources reveal a singer of considerable experience and renown with the award of the Gramophone 2023 Song category prize for his “Fauré: Complete Songs” the most notable feature. Interestingly the August 2022 original Gramophone reviewer wrote enthusiastically: “He has an instantly recognisable voice – very light, almost an haute-contre, honeyed, with a slight flutter that warms his tone and gives a gentle sense of vulnerability. Dubois’s diction is superb. He uses a lot of head voice here and is miked very closely, so there is a real sense of intimacy that comes through the speakers.” I found this quotation after listening to this new Vaughan Williams set and reference it in full because he applies an identical performing technique here.  

I have to admit my response to Dubois’ voice is not as unequivocally positive as the earlier reviewer’s. The positives are clear; his diction is excellent and his English equally so – without a hint of accent or mis-pronunciation. His voice is appealingly light and well-focussed and easily achieved across its entire range. What I do have more of a personal issue with is this repeated use of floated head voice. This is often – indeed, usually – aligned with a kind of fluty, vibrato-free sound which is exacerbated by this oddly close microphone placement. It reminded me of those old-school 1950’s American vocalists who allow the microphone to do the ‘work’ while they lightly sing. At the other extreme, Dubois’ loud singing deploys the fast vibrato again mentioned in the earlier review which is rather tremulous. Personally, I find his tonal palette rather limited between these two extremes. Not that this bothered me initially, but the cumulative impact of listening to a sequence of songs sung in an essentially similar manner had a diminishing effect with the floated head-voice sounding fey after a while. But clearly Dubois has a voice and performing style that is literally award-winning so others clearly respond differently to me. Equally clearly, these are well-prepared and carefully considered performances with uniformly excellent and sensitive accompaniments throughout.

The programme across the two discs is well-planned and enjoyable. Of course, all of the repertoire is available elsewhere in multiple – often classic – performances but this two-disc set is a unique collection. Here we have six cycles/song-sets interspersed by some works for solo piano and the two folk-song settings for voice and violin alone. Immediately prior to reviewing this set I listened to the latest release from Vaughan Williams’ prime advocates Albion Records, whose documentary presentation of their discs – quite aside from their musical and artistic qualities – is exemplary. Their liner note writers would have had a field-day with this programme which points up how inadequate this current booklet is. Quite why a French company missed the opportunity to point out that Vaughan Williams’ studies with Ravel were crucial to his development, I do not know. It shows the progression from the wonderful by slightly Victorian Songs of Travel which are pre-Ravel to the ground-breaking post-Ravel On Wenlock Edge in crucial context.  Never mind.  

The set opens with the atmospheric On Wenlock Edge which receives a fine performance with Dubois supported very well indeed by pianist Anne Le Bozec and what appears to be an ad hoc string quartet of highly accomplished players (the booklet again omits any information and a search online does not imply these players are a ‘regular’ quartet). NoMadMusic’s engineering is good without being top drawer – the piano (again no instrument indicated) feels a little dull-toned. Balances between the differing instrumental accompaniments and the very close voice vary but always allow the words to be heard and as mentioned, Dubois’ articulation is excellent. I cannot stress too much how welcome it is to hear non-British performers in repertoire which has been the preserve of just about every important British tenor of the last century. Dubois’ floated voice works well in the third song Is my team ploughing where the dialogue between ghost and living friend is sharply differentiated. Any performer will have to stand comparison with the great Ian Partridge accompanied by the Music Group of London led by the equally great Hugh Bean. Take the closing setting of Clun where the singer sings; “’Tis a long way further than Knighton, A quieter place than Clun” while the piano quintet intone still chords that somehow glimpse eternity. Partridge and his players encapsulate this stillness with disarming understated perfection as the music fades into the far distance. Dubois is very good here, too, capturing Vaughan Williams’ early genius movingly. Until recently Partridge was unchallenged for me in this work but a quite different, more explicitly dramatic, approach from Alessandro Fisher on Albion impressed me and has lingered in my memory.

Next is Vaughan Williams’ other Housman cycle – the much less familiar Along the Field.  Of the eight poems chosen by the composer, three are drawn from the famous A Shropshire Lad collection published in 1896 while the remaining five are from Last Poems published in 1922, which meant they were still relatively new texts when they were set in 1927. However, they share much of a similar mood of pastoral loss and regret of the earlier works. The unusual feature is the accompaniment by violin alone. Here that part is taken by Émeline Concé who played second violin in Wenlock Edge. She is absolutely excellent in this work, technically secure in a part that is awkward rather than difficult, but her real skill is the expressive pointing of her playing. There is a simplicity and almost folk-fiddle-like quality that is wholly idiomatic. This cycle is probably my favourite Dubois performance in the set too. His vocal style is the same as elsewhere but it seems to chime best with the emotional landscape of the work. The composer’s skill is that this is not some kind of faux Art-meets-Folk mash-up. Yes, there are some poems and settings that do mimic ‘fiddling’ but also there are starkly austere settings of remarkable power. Two of the “Last Poems” settings; No.3 The Half-Moon Westers Low and No.5 The Sigh that Heaves the Grasses have a melodic and harmonic freedom unusual in Vaughan Williams at this time. Recordings are fairly equally shared between male and female high voices. At a push, I prefer the female voice versions simply because of where the tessitura lies and therefore intermingles with the accompanying violin with the soprano singing over the instrument while the tenor sings below. Interesting to note that it was a soprano who gave the first performance and even more interesting that it was Marie Hall – the dedicatee of The Lark Ascending – who first played the violin part. But it is a very fine set of songs beautifully performed – John Mark Ainsley on Hyperion (a superb all-round collection) with Leo Phillips on violin is excellent, as well. In programming terms, I wonder whether it would have been better to swap this onto the second disc for the Ten Blake Songs? As it stands, we get fourteen Housman poems in a row which risks a degree of sameness…

One programming element here that most certainly does work is the interspersing of song with some works for solo piano. Vaughan Williams’ piano compositions are neither that numerous nor that typical. That said, the A Little Piano Book is as charming as it is slight. These are teaching miniatures – the complete set lasting just 5:55 here with three of the works titled two-part invention reflecting the composer’s life-long reverence for the works of Bach. Technically, these present no challenge for a player of Le Bozec’s calibre but again she plays with poise and clarity. Perhaps Mark Bebbington in his survey of the complete Vaughan Williams piano music on SOMM is even more searching and nuanced but Le Bozec offers an unfussy and pleasingly direct performance. Unfortunately, NoMadMusic seem to have managed to mix up the order of the music, so while the liner lists the six pieces in the correct order the disc plays them differently – the first piece which should be the Valse Lente becomes No.6 Two-part invention in G.  No.4 is No.1 and No.6 is placed fourth! Interestingly, on the Presto website the download listing has the order as it is played on the CD’s: 6,2,3,1,5,4 although why this was changed from the printed order or why it never trickled down to the booklet compilers is not clear – oops…

Disc one is completed by the Four Poems by Fredegond Shrove. Often Vaughan Williams chose texts by well-known poets. Shrove was not that, but presumably swum into the composer’s ken through being his niece (the daughter of his first wife’s sister). Even contemporary critics considered her a minor poet but two of the four settings here have remained amongst Vaughan Williams’ best-known songs; No.3 The New Ghost and No.4 The Watermill.  As such these are often included in song recitals for all voices – Ian Partridge again a notable exponent while soprano Ruth Golden sang the complete set on her Koch (latterly Decca) disc that includes a fine/complete performance of Along the Field. While The Watermill inhabits the same faux-folksiness of say Linden Lea – and is none the worse for that – The New Ghost is the superior song and impressive on every level. When heard sung by a soprano voice there is an uncanny musical parallel with elements of the vocal writing in Vaughan Williams’ extraordinary chamber opera Riders to the Sea which he was writing at much the same time as this cycle. Originally conceived for a baritone, it is less frequently heard in the high (tenor or soprano) version as on this new disc. I am sure other listeners will respond more than I to Dubois’ vocal style especially in this particular song which I find mannered. But one person’s mannered is another’s expressive.

Alongside On Wenlock Edge, Songs of Travel is surely Vaughan Williams’ best-known and most recorded song cycle. Again, this was conceived for baritone but has been published and recorded by tenors too – Robert Tear and the great Anthony Rolfe-Johnson spring immediately to mind. Albion recently released the first complete cycle sung by a female voice – a choice for which there is historical precedent. By now, listeners will know what to expect of Dubois in this repertoire; the opening The Vagabond is sung with energy and the fast, fluttering vibrato. The basic tempo is quicker than many, adding urgency if working against the implicit weariness some performers seek. Dubois does mainly choose higher transpositions than Rolfe-Johnson – he has the range so that is interesting rather than choice-defining. I am more concerned by the degree of word-pointing in a song such as The infinite shining heavens where to my ear a sense of rapt stillness and simplicity pays greater dividends. Both Rolfe-Johnson and Tear achieve this poised visionary beauty.

Robert Tear never had the most beautiful voice but he was a master of understated expression. As part of the same collection that included his Songs of Travel, this quality was particularly displayed in his version of the very late Ten Blake Songs accompanied only by oboist Neil Black. If Along the Field sought to test the composer’s ability to work with minimal textures, this goes a stage further. The words are settings of William Blake taken mainly from his Songs of Innocence and Experience published in 1789. Even before the composer sets a word, these poems have a density and power quite beyond Housman’s nostalgic musings. This is another remarkable example of Vaughan Williams’ questing nature as these date from 1957 – right at the end of his long life and contemporaneous with the elusive yet visionary Symphony No.9. The impetus came from writing a score for a film titled The Vision of William Blake. Perhaps more surprisingly, given that he had been quite a prolific song writer in his earlier years, except for a single song, this was the first such work he wrote in the thirty years since Along the Field. In the earlier cycle Vaughan Williams could avoid the monophony of the violin by the use of quite a lot of double stopping and spread chords to imply harmony. Here, the accompanying solo oboe can only offer a single note at any time. The result is an enforced musical austerity that is brilliantly made an expressive strength rather than musical weakness.

Dubois’ oboist is Baptiste Gibier who the web (Facebook) suggests – no help from the liner of course – is oboist with the Orchestre National de Lille. He plays quite beautifully with a liquid and seamless tone. Direct comparisons are offered by the usual suspects of Partridge, Tear and Ainsley.  Perhaps most interesting to compare is the evolution in the style of oboe playing. The earliest of the above features Janet Craxton who has a wonderfully plangent tone compared to the warmer toned Neil Black for Tear while Gareth Hulse for Ainsley and Gibier here are even more richly sonorous. Not content with writing for two lines in the fourth song London Vaughan Williams has the voice alone.  The text of this song is bleak in the extreme; “But most thro’ midnight streets I hear how the youthful Harlot’s curse blasts the new-born Infant’s tear, and blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”.  Partridge sings this at an emotional remove – simply reporting, Tear is similarly austere but with greater textural pointing.  Both Ainsley and certainly Dubois to my ear try too hard to word paint – the grimness of the picture the poet paints needs no extra illustration.

Because this cycle does not seek to provide the listener with the melodic richness of the Songs of Travel or the impressionist beauty of Wenlock Edge it will never be ‘popular’ in the way much of Vaughan Williams’ music is, but there is a case for it being his single finest achievement in the genre of song set/cycle.  Clearly Dubois has thought long and carefully about his performance so the result is very good although I think stripping back on the overt emotion would pay even greater results.  The two English Folks Songs for voice and violin are far simpler affairs. Émeline Concé is once again an excellent accompanist, playing with a perfect blend of technical finesse and folk-like naturalness.  The second song The Lawyer is performed at a rollickingly boisterous tempo which is a wholly effective choice.

Just time for another brief piano only interlude – here the Hymn Tune Prelude on Song 13 by Orlando Gibbons which Anne Le Bozec once again plays with fluent simplicity and directness. The set closes with another gem; the Four Hymns for tenor, viola and piano. These were composed in 1914 which places them just after A London Symphony and exactly contemporaneous with the first version of A Lark Ascending.  Joining Dubois and Le Bozec is violist Louise Desjardins who again is quite excellent.  Once more, I find it hard to look beyond Ian Partridge who has this style of chaste ecstasy off to perfection even if his violist Christopher Wellington is not so rich-toned or absolutely secure as Desjardins.  Partridge’s especial skill is apparent in the third which he sings with weightless simplicity. Dubois aims for something similar but this is the type of performance I find oddly bloodless by him – but both Le Bozec and Desjardins are very fine.

So overall this is a valuable survey that covers nearly all of the main Vaughan Williams cycles/song groups for accompaniments other than just piano – Merciless Beauty is probably the main omission which is a shame because it is another lovely work. Reaction to this set will be wholly defined by the listener’s response to the sound and manner of Cyrille Dubois’ singing and the way in which that has been captured by the NoMadMusic engineers. Given the amount of time and effort that will have gone into this project by the performers, the poor quality of the booklet as a listening guide is frustrating to say the least, but that these are lovingly sympathetic performances of enduringly moving and beautiful music is never in doubt.

Nick Barnard

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Contents
On Wenlock Edge (1909)
Along the Field (1927)
A Little Piano Book (1934)
Four Poems by Fredegond Shove (1922-1925)
Songs of Travel (1901-1904)
Ten Blake Songs (1957)
Two English Folk Songs (1913)
Hymn Tune Prelude on Song 13 (1930)
Four Hymns (1914)