Peter Warlock (1894-1930)
Transcriptions of Elizabethan Songs
Rebecca Lea (soprano), Ciara Hendrick (mezzo soprano), David de Winter (tenor)
Piatti Quartet
rec. 2026, All Saints’, East Finchley, London, UK
Texts included
Convivium Records CR134 [53]

I was looking forward to this collection of Peter Warlock’s 1926 transcriptions of Elizabethan Songs, which consist of three volumes containing 22 songs. I can’t find a competing version in the catalogue and to have the complete set presented in this way is not only attractive but valuable. Warlock’s musicology was ahead of the times, and he took great pains to reflect, and honour, the originals and not ‘improve’ them as so many of his contemporaries did. One thinks of Frederick Keel’s volumes of Elizabethan Love Songs or Arthur Somervell, with a later repertoire, substituting unrelated English lyrics for those in Handel’s aria from Tolomeo, known as ‘Silent Worship’. Naturally, Warlock called upon the accompanying strings of the time, the string quartet, instead of a consort. Otherwise, there are very few amendments.

There are three singers involved accompanied by the Piatti Quartet, which plays very finely, attentive to dynamics and imitative passages, to tonal blending, to the use of pizzicato (for example, in John Quoth Joan) and lightness as well as those moments of dissonance that are part of this repertoire – sensitive performers indeed. The singers are, in descending order of effectiveness, David de Winter, Rebecca Lea and Ciara Hendrick. For me the most accomplished of the singers is de Winter, alert to the witty bird imitations of The Merry Pleasant Spring, finding expressive depth in Born is the Babe, an especially beautiful setting that relishes the quartet’s imitative potential, and elegiac depth in Alas, Alack My Heart is Woe.

Rebecca Lea and Ciara Hendrick lack de Winter’s clarity of diction, but Lea is quietly assured in the gentle Sweet Was The Song The Virgin Sung and does well in the lament Abradad and in Cuckoo, though I find a lack of personality in her singing. Ciara Hendrick has been praised on this site in the past when she was a soprano, but she has now dropped to singing mezzo and developed an obtrusive wobble which is unignorable. I’m afraid that, whatever the expressive virtues of her singing, her voice gave me little pleasure. It’s a voice wholly at odds with the words of Nicholas Strogers’ A Doleful Deadly Pang and even when she sings softly, as in O Death, Rock Me Asleep, her voice still hardens and oscillates.

I have never seen a disclaimer in a CD booklet but there is one, prominently displayed in highlit text, immediately after the fine programme notes from Michael Graves, chairman of the Peter Warlock Society. As an index of the absurdity and toxicity prevailing in the arts establishment it could hardly be bettered and reads, in full; ‘In completing this collection, we have chosen to record each song in its original form. Some of these texts contain language and attitudes that reflect the social and cultural norms of the Elizabethan era and may be at odds with modern values. They are included for historical completeness only, and the views they express are not those of the performers or Convivium Records.’

In other words, ‘Elizabethan values do not align with those of this organisation’. I leave it to your judgement as to how pitiful you consider Convivium’s position.

The recording quality is well judged throughout and there are full texts. But this is a generally disappointing disc, redeemed to a large extent by the Piatti Quartet and de Winter and sometimes by Lea.

Jonathan Woolf

Contents
1. Sweet Was The Song The Virgin Sung – Anonymous
2. This Merry Pleasant Spring – Anonymous
3. Were I Made Juror – William Wigthorp
4. My Little Sweet Darling – William Byrd
5. I Am Not I Of Such Belief – William Wigthorp
6. Born Is The Babe – Anonymous
7. Encores: Leaf – Richard Nicholson
8. When May Is In His Prime – Attrib. Richard Edwardes
9. Abradad – Richard Farrant
10. Ah Silly Poor Joas – Anonymous
11. Enforc’d By Love And Fear – Robert Parsons
12. Pandolpho – Robert Parsons
13. Buy New Broom – Thomas Whythorne
14. O Jove, From Stately Throne – Richard Farrant
15. O Death, Rock Me Asleep – Anonymous
16. In The Merry May Morn – Richard Nicholson
17. Send Forth Thy Sighs – Nathanel Pattrick
18. Guichardo – Anonymous
19. Cuckoo – Richard Nicholson
20. A Doleful Deadly Pang – Nicholas Strogers
21. No More, Good Herdsman, Of Thy Song – Richard Nicholson
22. Alas, Alack, My Heart Is Woe – Anonymous