On Wenlock Edge a song cycle
On Wenlock Edge
From far, from eve and morning Is my team ploughing?
Oh. when I was in love with you Bredon Hill Clun sung by Ren6 Soames (tenor) with the Hirsch String Quartet:
Leonard Hirsch (violin) Patrick Halling (violin) Stephen Shingles (viola) Francisco Gabarro (cello) and Clifton Helliwell (piano)
Vaughan Williams was one of the first composers to be attracted by A. B. Housman 's A Shropshire Lad. His setting of the six poems that make up ' On Wenlock Edge' dates from 1909 (the year of - the Tallis Fantasia and the music to The Wasps). He had just returned from studying with Ravel in Paris, and the song cycle, with its atmospheric effects, has been criticised as over-elaborate for the poems. But some of the songs have an appealing simplicity, the words are set with the utmost sensitiveness, and the whole work takes a place of importance in the history of English music.
Harold Rutland