One Hundred Years 3

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.