Octo_Russ

Vaughan Williams - Songs Of Travel [Terfel/Martineau]

Just a word about the booklet, this is obviously not Terfel / Martineau on DG, but i found that booklet very poor visually, so i amalgamated it with this disc, as a double disc set, so these now become the visuals, also the Terfel disc was very uneven, the Vaughan Williams and Finzi items were excellent, but the Butterworth songs were very poor, on this disc there's a full selection of Vaughan Williams only songs, i find him a much better composer of song.

The other problem i have is that Bryn Terfel is such a larger than life singer, he can make singing the phone book sound interesting!, Benjamin Luxon on the other hand is just plain very good, but the visuals are excellent, so this amalgamation tries to get the best of both worlds into one package.

Bryn Terfel is of course Welsh, he is now 45, and he made this recording in 1995 when he was 30, the front cover for the [Luxon] booklet [photo by David Usill] is excellent, with Luxon chest high in the long grass near where the recording was made.

Vaughan Williams 'Songs Of Travel' are so idiomatic to the time they were written, 'Songs Of Travel' were originally a book of forty odd poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, roughly on the nature of travel, and not merely geographical, but the travels through life of the human heart, Vaughan Williams chose nine of the poems, and set them to music, he seems to have chosen those that depict a lonely wanderer, searching all his life for physical sustenance, but in his journey, discovering a more spiritual sustenance, the words are powerful, and even more powerful transformed by the hand of Vaughan Williams, music evokes something mor than mere words alone cannot do.

The songs i enjoyed the most were 1, 4 & 7, and it's the seventh song 'Wither Must I Wander' that is so heartfelt and full of nostalgia and aching, for a life that goes under the bridge like a stream, to be gone and no more come back, the words touch on these feelings, the end of the first verse for instance,

Home no more home to me, whither must i wander?

Hunger my driver, i go where i must

Cold blows the winter wind over hill and heather

Thick drives the rain, and my roof is in the dust

Loved of wise men was the shade of my roof tree

The true word of welcome was spoken in the door

Dear days of old, with the faces in the firelight

Kind folks of old, you come again no more

Terfel sings the last two lines quieter, and sings 'firelight' high and sustained,

Here's Paul Wilt singing 'Whither Must I Wander' on YouTube.