A Shropshire Lad: English Songs Orchestrated by Roderick Williams

As a vocal soloist, Roderick Williams has shared the concert platform with the world’s top orchestras. “Many times, sitting right next to a large orchestra, I’m thinking, ‘Who’s making that sound?’” Williams tells Apple Music. “And I’m able to look around and see who’s playing. Sometimes I even sidle up to players and say, ‘I notice you’re playing it very low in a register’ or ‘What’s that percussion instrument called? How do you write for it?’ So, I’m spending my time absorbing and learning from other composers.” For Williams, one of England’s leading baritones and a distinguished composer in his own right, the genesis of this album’s programme with Mark Elder and the Hallé was his long-standing fascination with Vaughan Williams’ song cycle The House of Life, originally scored for voice and piano. “I’d always wondered about orchestral colours in the song ‘Love’s Minstrels’, which speaks about the harp and the oboe—the ‘hautboy’. It made me think that it would be quite interesting with a harp and an oboe.” Having orchestrated two of the Vaughan Williams songs, Williams was then asked to orchestrate the whole cycle for the Chipping Campden Festival in 2017, and in the meantime had made a string arrangement of another major cycle, Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, for the City of London Sinfonia. Both those cycles are the main pillars of this album, also featuring Mark Elder and the Hallé orchestra, but with the Butterworth now entirely re-orchestrated. “I think Butterworth’s cycle was probably the beginning of it,” says Williams. Elder had asked him to orchestrate Butterworth’s cycle for full orchestra for a performance in 2020 (but cancelled due to the COVID pandemic). This, naturally, prompted Williams to examine Butterworth’s orchestral rhapsody of the same name, which takes a number of themes from the song cycle: “I realised quite quickly that the rhapsody is an entirely different beast—it’s a proper purely orchestral piece and nothing to do with the less-is-more style of writing that Butterworth had for his song cycle.” Williams’ orchestration of the Butterworth takes a similarly restrained approach, although there are still several imaginative touches. Most striking is its final song, “Is my team ploughing?”, where the unearthly strains of a muted string quartet, playing without vibrato, accompany the questions of an unquiet ghost, contrasted with the richly scored chords of his living “comrade”, who answers. The rest of the programme includes songs by Butterworth and Vaughan Williams’ near contemporaries, a notable exception being a quirky setting of Thomas Hardy’s “When I set out for Lyonnesse” by Roderick Williams’ long-standing colleague, the conductor and composer James Burton. Another significant element is the inclusion of several songs by women composers who were pupils of Vaughan Williams. One discovery was a song by Ruth Gipps, “The Pulley”, a real rarity which Williams received as an unpublished manuscript: “I contacted Ruth Gipps’ estate,” he explains, “and what came back to me was a series of songs in manuscript—so that’s why some of them, particularly Ruth Gipps’ song, you may not have heard, because I don’t think it’s been performed much. It’s a very unusual song with a harmonic progression that, considering Gipps was a pupil of Vaughan Williams, doesn’t sound like Vaughan Williams at all. Many times, in preparing the score, I wondered whether a chord was correct, and I’d go back and check the manuscript to see that it was very clearly what she wanted.” Given this fresh injection of unfamiliar repertoire, and with the full forces of the Hallé at his disposal, Williams saw an opportunity to complement the Butterworth and Vaughan Williams works with a richer palette of orchestral colours. His arrangement of Ina Boyle’s song “The Joy of Earth” is particularly inventive, involving a solo violin but otherwise scored for soft brass chords with occasional woodwind. His own personal favourites, however, are his arrangements of Rebecca Clarke’s atmospheric and eerie “The Seal Man”—in which he makes use of the orchestra’s full colour range, including percussion, harp and even celeste—and Madeleine Dring’s song “Take, O take those lips away” “because the violin solo is my addition; it’s not in the piano part. But I just thought it would be fun if we had a countermelody on the violin. And Roberto Ruisi, the Hallé’s concertmaster, plays it so beautifully, so sweetly. It makes me smile every time.”