Various Artists - Big Broadcast: Jazz & Popular Music 1920s 5 / Various - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Various Artists - Celtic Folk From Brittany [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/11/2009

Song composition has been a constant in British music since the lute and consort works of the early seventeenth century. By 1900, it had developed into a sophisticated genre embraced by almost all serious composers. The music on this amply-filled disc illustrates the diversity of British song-writing and it's transformation over a century from Vaughan Williams's Orpheus and his Lute (ca 1901) to Huw Watkins's Five Larkin Songs, composed in 2010 for Carolyn Sampson, who performs them here. Together with Joseph Middleton, her partner on several acclaimed recital discs, she has devised a highly contrasting programme bookended by two groups of songs by William Walton - A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table from 1962, celebrating the diversity of London, and three songs from Façade, the 'entertainment' with which the young composer gained both fame and notoriety in 1923. These frame settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter and Frank Bridge of poetry by writers from Shakespeare and Shelley to Keats and Yeats. In comparison, the anti-romantic poems by Philip Larkin have been described as marked by 'a very English, glum accuracy'. Huw Watkins (b. 1976) has selected texts from across Larkin's output, catching the various moods - ranging from a certain unsentimental nostalgia to the poet's seemingly habitual pessimism - in settings that often carry a bittersweet sting in the tail.

This 25 track CD with 3 previously unreleased songs was compiled and annotated by Rich Conaty, host of the Big Broadcast on WFUV-FM, N.Y. Features music from Fletcher Henderson & Orch., Mound City Blue Blowers, Ben Bernie's Hotel Roosevelt Orch., Scrappy Lambert, Don Voorhees & Orch., Larry Abbott & Orch., Musical Stevedores, Fred Rich & Orch., Marion Harris, Cab Calloway & Orch., Red Nichols and His Five Pennies, the Three Keys, Paul Whiteman & Orch., Rudy Vallee and His Connecticut Yankees, Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orch., Ted Lewis and His Band, Chocolate Dandies, Cliff Edwards with the Eton Boys, Joe Venuti and His Blue Four, Mal Hallett & Orch., Garland Wilson, Gene Austin and others.