Programme — Pretty Ring Time (1925), Autumn Evening Op.14 No.1 (1910), Come to me in my dreams (1906) …

Pretty Ring Time (1925)

Roger Quilter (1877-1953)

Autumn Evening Op.14 No.1 (1910)

Frank Bridge (1879-1941)

Come to me in my dreams (1906)

Roger Quilter

Fair house of Joy Op.12 No.7 (1908)

It takes some courage for a composer to invite comparison of his work with Thomas Morley’s setting of It was a lover and his lass which, having been associated with Shakespeare’s words for more than 400 years, has acquired the status of a folk song. Many have risked it even so – Delius, Quilter, Finzi among others – but only Warlock survives unscathed. The tripping rhythms, the cheerful melodic line, the chirping refrain, the none too deliberate pause for thought on “How that life was but a flower” are all there in his Pretty Ring Tim (as he chose to call it). At the same time the harmonies and the keyboard texture, acquiring more and more interest from stanza to stanza, remain distinctively his own.

Quilter is heard at his best in Autumn Evening. It is a song remarkable not so much for its word-setting, sensitive though it is, as for the melancholy beauty of the piano prelude, which is fragmentarily present throughout until it emerges again in the postlude. The emotional ambiguity of Bridge’s Arnold setting, Come to me in my dreams, where the pain of separation mingles with the joy of anticipated reunion, makes a searchingly harmonised transition to Quilter’s unqualified rhapsody to love in Fair House of Joy.