English concert programme — Roberts, Grant, Elias & Baker

5 Songs from the NMC Songbook

John White (b 1936) — Houses and Gardens in the Heart of England

Jeremy Dale Roberts (b 1934) — Spoken to a Bronze Head

Julian Grant (b 1960) — Know Thy Kings and Queens

Brian Elias (b 1948) — Meet Me in the Green Glen

Richard Baker (b 1972) — English Lullaby

The NMC Songbook is an ambitious anthology of contemporary song assembled to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the foundation of NMC as a charity devoted to making commercial recordings of British new music. Commissioned by NMC Recordings from more than 120 composers, performed by 20 singers and 11 accompanists (not all of them pianists) and recently issued on a handsomely produced set of four CDs, it is a wonderfully diverse collection embracing just about every method of word setting, or vocalisation, capable of notation.

Without touching on the extremes, the five songs included in this programme give a good idea of the stylistic range of the album. Wit, for example, which is a rather more prominent feature than lyrical beauty, is engagingly represented by John White’s Satie-esque treatment of lines from an uninspired National Trust publication, Houses and Gardens in the Heart of England. In well chosen contrast, with a piano part as hard to the touch as the bronze itself, Jeremy Dale Roberts’s Spoken to a Bronze Head is a moving setting of Ursula Vaughan Williams’s address to a sculpted portrait of (presumably) her late husband. The piano part of Julian Grant’s Know Thy Kings and Queens is no less striking although this one, with its drily articulated dissonances accompanying a recitation of royal succession, is irresistibly comic in effect. In Brian Elias’s John Clare setting, Meet me in the green glen, there is no accompaniment of any kind, just a seductively shaped and modally inflected vocal line. Richard Baker switches his keyboard colouring in English Lullaby between the dreamily poetic and the restlessly prosaic as the vocal line varies between sleepy song and everyday speech.