5 Aug 2023
Ivor Gurney: Two songs – In Flanders and Sleep; Prelude in D flat (piano)
George Butterworth: Six songs from a Shropshire Lad
Franz Schubert: Die Tauberpost, An die Musik, Freiwilliges Versinken and Lachen und Winen
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Love-Sight (from The House of Life) and L’Amour de Moy
Maurice Ravel: Pavane pour une Infante Defunte (piano); Five songs from Histoires Naturelles
Michael Flanders & Donald Swann: The Armadillo and The Spider
Johnny Herford, an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, performs in opera, song and oratorio. He has won prizes at the Kathleen Ferrier competition and the Wigmore Hall International Song competition. Libby Burgess, who accompanied the cellist Cara Berridge in our 2022 season, is a solo and chamber pianist as well as a vocal coach and teacher: amongst many other positions she has recently adjudicated at the Oxford Lieder Young Artist Programme and coaches at Chetham’s School.
They programme groups of songs which contrast the English composers of the of the early twentieth century whose pastoral idyll was so cruelly shattered by the outbreak of the First World War with Romantic works of Schubert, and Ravel’s precise and ironic world of fantasy. We finish with inimitable Flanders and Swann.