English concert programme — Berkeley, Bridge, Britten & Porter

Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989)

O lurcher-loving collier (1958)

Frank Bridge (1879-1941)

Go not happy day (1903)

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

2 Folksong Arrangements from Vol.2: British Isles (1945-6)

O Waly, Waly

Sweet Polly Oliver

Cole Porter (1891-1964)

Night and Day (1932)

Lennox Berkely wrote his Five Poems of W.H. Auden not during the period of his close association with the Britten-Auden circle in the late 1930s but two decades later – which must have seemed like at least half a lifetime. Not only had a World War intervened but he had been married for 12 years and he was the father of three sons (the oldest of whom, Michael, had acquired none other than Benjamin Britten as a godfather). Although Lennox Berkeley had been the first composer to set an Auden text, by the time he came to the Five Poems all but one of the texts he chose had already been set by Britten. “O lurcher-loving collier,” for example, had featured in Coal Face, the first of Britten’s collaborations with Auden for the GPO Film Unit, in 1935. It is difficult to imagine, however, a more compassionate setting than Berkeley’s. It might seem at first, from the lurching gait of the piano introduction, that the song is to be more about the dog than the collier. But, although the same uneven rhythm persists in the accompaniment, the intense expression in the vocal part – which is particularly urgent at “Course for her heart and do not miss” – demonstrates where the true sympathies of the poet and composer lie.

“Go not happy day” by Frank Bridge, Britten’s main and most influential teacher, takes us back a generation in the history of English song. Among the earliest of the 50 or so songs Bridge wrote before his interest in this area declined in the mid-1920s, it is a wonderfully fresh, apparently impulsive inspiration which has long been a favourite – thanks not least to the advocacy of Kathleen Ferrier, among other distinguished British singers.

Although he he did not take a creative interest in the folk song in the way that Vaughan Williams or, in a rather different way, Bartók did, Britten made his own versions of more than fifty folk songs or near-folk songs – most of them for voice and piano but in some special cases with guitar or harp accompaniment. Originally from Somerset, “O Waly, Waly” is presented here with complete melodic fidelity and yet, in its highly economical use of a three-note piano figure in discreetly but significantly varying harmonies, the arrangement could scarcely be by anyone else. Unsentimental though Britten’s version of “Sweet Polly Oliver” is – and consistenly witty though it is in its use of canon between voice and piano – it deprives the song of none of its emotional value.

Among Michael Berkeley and Felicity Lott’s several collaborations was a TV programme of songs built round the theme of night and day, ranging from Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume” to Cole Porter’s little masterpiece. Berkeley was so “entranced” by “Night and Day,” he says, “that I thought it would make a nice coda to her group, which she also helped to choose. I think that in pieces like this, Porter is up there with the great song writers.”