SOMM Recordings announces the third and final volume of the enthusiastically received One Hundred Years of British Song, with tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Nathan Williamson. Focusing on songs written since 1950, Volume 3 celebrates what Williamson's booklet note describes as "astonishment at the depth of expressivity of the poetry and music". Receiving first recordings are John Woolrich's settings of Irish poet Matthew Sweeney, The Unlit Suburbs, a deadpan yet evocative exercise in "alternative realism", and Geoffrey Poole's stylistically wide-ranging The Eye of the Blackbird, with texts from Virginia Woolf, traditional Nigerian poems, Wallace Stevens, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Requiem Mass. Also on album for the first time are Williamson's own song-cycle setting poems by Bryan Heiser composed especially for James Gilchrist, The Little That Was Once a Man, and solo-piano miniature, Intermezzo. Peter Dickinson's early, accomplished Four W.H. Auden Songs and dramatic and intense yet positive and joyful Let the Florid Music Praise, and Madeleine Dring's characterful Five Betjeman Songs, the product of a "fascinating and multi-faceted artistic personality", complete the release.

Tracklist:

Let The Florid Music Praise (Version For Tenor & Piano)
4 W.H. Auden Songs: No. 1, Look, Stranger
4 W.H. Auden Songs: No. 2, Eyes Look Into The Well
4 W.H. Auden Songs: No. 3, Carry Her Over The Water
4 W.H. Auden Songs: No. 4, What's In Your Mind?
5 Betjeman Songs: No. 1, A Bay In Anglesey
5 Betjeman Songs: No. 2, Song Of A Nightclub Proprietress
5 Betjeman Songs: No. 3, Business Girls
5 Betjeman Songs: No. 4, Undenominational
5 Betjeman Songs: No. 5, Upper Lambourne
The Little That Was Once A Man: No. 1, In Someone Else's Poem
The Little That Was Once A Man: No. 2, 4am
The Little That Was Once A Man: No. 3, Not Being The Ordinary Way
The Little That Was Once A Man: No. 4, Not Being Misunderstanding
The Little That Was Once A Man: No. 5, Moon At Rest
The Unlit Suburbs: No. 1, The Submerged Bar
The Unlit Suburbs: No. 2, Rat Town
The Unlit Suburbs: No. 3, The Ghost Choir
Intermezzo
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 1, Twenty Snowy Mountains
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 2, The Autumn Wind
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 3, I Was Of Three Minds
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 4, Which To Prefer
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 5, Icicles
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 6, I Know Noble Accents
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 7, Out Of Sight
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 8, He Rode Over Connecticut
The Eye Of The Blackbird: No. 9, Evening All Afternoon

UPC: 748871064621
Label: Somm Recordings
Release Date: 2.4.22
Format: CD

Dickinson / Gilchrist / Williamson - One Hundred Years 3 (CD)