Release Date: 06/10/08

Twenty songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams from the beginning of his career in 1895, up to the peak of his career in 1935.

Albion's second recording, from Potton Hall in 2007, is of early songs by Vaughan Williams, including four world premiers. Performers are Roderick Williams, Iain Burnside, Sarah Fox and Andrew Staples. Vaughan Williams was widely read, and strongly drawn to Shakespeare and poets including Walt Whitman and Elizabethan poets including Robert Herrick. He was obsessed with finding 'settable' poems. He composed over 100 songs in total and would often turn to song to express deep emotions. The twenty songs on this CD were composed over 30 years and demonstrate in the early songs of 1895 and 1896 a remarkable assurance. They show that Vaughan Williams was aware of the beauty and musical quality of lyric poetry in his early twenties and had the technical ability to successfully match words to music. Sarah Fox studied Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, and singing at the Royal College of Music. She won the 1997 Kathleen Ferrier Award and the 2000 John Christie Award. Andrew Staples is considered by many to be one of the most versatile British singers. In addition, he is an experienced opera director, and is increasingly in demand as a portrait photographer. Roderick Williams OBE encompasses a wide repertoire, from baroque to contemporary music. He won the Singer of the Year Award in the 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. He is also a composer and has had works premiered at the Wigmore and Barbican Halls, the Purcell Room and live on national radio. Iain Burnside is a Scottish classical pianist and accompanist, and a former presenter on BBC Radio 3. Following study at Merton College, Oxford, the Royal Academy of Music and the Chopin Academy, in Warsaw he became a freelance pianist, specializing particularly in song repertoire. He has written a musical play A Soldier and a Maker on the life of Ivor Gurney, premiered in 2012.