Nick Pritchard, tenor and Joseph Middleton, piano

Part 1: The Spirit of Place: Landscapes and Legend

Severn Meadows

Ivor Gurney

Only the wanderer

Knows England's graces,

Or can anew see clear

Familiar faces.

And who loves joy as he

That dwells in shadows?

Do not forget me quite,

O Severn meadows.

King David

Walter de la Mare

King David was a sorrowful man:

No cause for his sorrow had he;

And he called for the music of a hundred harps,

To ease his melancholy.

They played till they all fell silent:

Played and play sweet did they;

But the sorrow that haunted the heart of King David

They could not charm away.

He rose; and in his garden

Walked by the moon alone,

A nightingale hidden in a cypress tree,

Jargoned on and on.

King David lifted his sad eyes Into the dark-boughed tree –

"Tell me, thou little bird that singest,

Who taught my grief to thee?"

But the bird in no-wise heeded;

And the king in the cool of the moon

Hearkened to the nightingale's sorrowfulness,

Till all his own was gone.

Adlestrop

Edward Thomas

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.

It was late June.

The steam hissed.

Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform.

What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Nothing Gold can stay

Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Tranformations

Thomas Hardy

Portion of this yew

Is a man my grandsire knew,

Bosomed here at its foot:

This branch may be his wife,

A ruddy human life

Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made

Of her who often prayed,

Last century, for repose;

And the fair girl long ago

Whom I often tried to know

May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,

But as nerves and veins abound

In the growths of upper air,

And they feel the sun and rain,

And the energy again

That made them what they were!

Part 2: Time and Memory - Echoes of War and Peace

In Flanders

Frederick William Harvey

I'm homesick for my hills again -

To see above the Severn plain

Unscabbarded against the sky

The blue high blade of Cotswold lie;

The giant clouds go royally

By jagged Malvern with a train

Of shadows.

Where the land is low

Like a huge imprisoning O

I hear a heart that's sound and high,

I hear the heart within me cry:

"I'm homesick for my hills again -

Cotswold or Malvern, sun or rain!

My hills again!"

Budmouth Dears

Thomas Hardy

When we lay where Budmouth Beach is,

O, the girls were fresh as peaches,

With their tall and tossing figures and their eyes of blue and brown!

And our hearts would ache with longing

As we paced from our sing-songing,

With a smart Clink! Clink! up the Esplanade and down.

They distracted and delayed us

By the pleasant pranks they played us,

And what marvel, then, if troopers, even of regiments of renown,

On whom flashed those eyes divine, O,

Should forget that countersign, O,

As we tore Clink! Clink! back to camp above the town.

Do they miss us much, I wonder,

Now that war has swept us sunder,

And we roam from where the faces smile to where the faces frown?

And no more behold the features

Of the fair fantastic creatures,

And no more Clink! Clink! past the parlours of the town?

Shall we once again there meet them?

Falter fond attempts to greet them?

Will the gay sling-jacket glow again beside the muslin gown? –

Will they archly quiz and con us

With a sideway glance upon us,

While our spurs Clink! Clink! up the Esplanade and down?

Lost Love

Clifford Bax

Now have I bidden farewell

To the Spring, that is ah! how fleet

And a long farewell to my lover,

Alas! how long is the pain!

Truly the flowers in a year

will blossom afresh at my feet.

But never the season return

When I and my darling shall meet.

Who gave me a gift so precious,

But left me to love it in vain?

The Master of Magic who sent it,

Ah! surely could send it again.

If only to darken the darkness,

O Thou in Thy heavens above,

Why dost Thou light for a moment

The lamp of a beautiful thing?

Who is there now that will carry

My little winegourd for love,

When I go next year to the meadow

To look on the joy of the Spring?

By a Bierside

John Masefield

This is a sacred city, built of marvellous earth.

Life was lived nobly there to give such Beauty birth.

Beauty was in this brain and in this eager hand.

Death is so blind and dumb, death does not understand.

Death drifts the brain with dust and soils the young limbs' glory.

Death makes justice a dream and stength a traveller's story.

Death drives the lovely soul to wander under the sky.

Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.

Part 3: Love and Loss in the English Songbook

The Cherry Tree

Margaret Rose Girdler

The cherry's abloom in the Northland

The wild, lone cherry tree.

The sad, sweet birds of the Springtime

Are singing again to  me.

They sing of the frozen rivers

Piping soft and low

Till I think I hear your footsteps dancing across the snow.

Sing, birds!  Sing songs of the Springtime,

Sing high on the cherry tree.

Sing of my love in the Northland

As my love once sang to me.

Hush, birds!  the cherry in silence  Is letting her petals fall.

For one whose dancing footsteps

Will never come at all.

The fields are full

Edward Shanks

The fields are full of summer still

And breathe again upon the air

From brown dry side of hedge and hill

More sweetness than the sense can bear.

So some old couple, who in youth

With love were filled and over-full,

And loved with strength and loved with truth,

In heavy age are beautiful..

Ditty

Thomas Hardy

BENEATH a knap where flown

Nestlings play,

Within walls of weathered stone,

Far away

From the files of formal houses,

By the bough the firstling browses,

Lives a Sweet: no merchants meet,

No man barters, no man sells

Where she dwells.

Upon that fabric fair

"Here is she!"

Seems written everywhere

Unto me.

But to friends and nodding neighbors,

Fellow wights in lot and labors,

Who descry the times as I,

No such lucid legend tells

Where she dwells.

Should I lapse to what I was

In days by—

(Such cannot be, but because

Some loves die

Let me feign it)—none would notice

That where she I know by rote is

Spread a strange and withering change,

Like a drying of the wells

Where she dwells.

To feel I might have kissed—

Loved as true—

Otherwhere, nor Mine have missed

My life through,

Had I never wandered near her,

Is a smart severe—severer

In the thought that she is nought,

Even as I, beyond the dells

Where she dwells.

And Devotion droops her glance

To recall

What bond-servants of Chance

We are all.

I but found her in that, going

On my errant path unknowing,

I did not out-skirt the spot

That no spot on earth excels—

Where she dwells!

The Dance Continued

Thomas Hardy

Regret not me;

Beneath the sunny tree

I lie uncaring, slumbering peacefully.

Swift as the light

I flew my faery flight;

Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.

I did not know

That heydays fade and go,

But deemed that what was would be always so.

I skipped at morn

Between the yellowing corn,

Thinking it good and glorious to be born.

I ran at eves

Among the piled-up sheaves,

Dreaming, ‘I grieve not, therefore nothing grieves’.

Now soon will come

The apple, pear, and plum,

And hinds will sing, and autumn insects hum.

Again you will fare

To cider-makings rare,

And junketings; but I shall not be there.

Yet gaily sing

Until the pewter ring

Those songs we sang when we went gipsying.

And lightly dance

Some triple-timed romance

In coupled figures, and forget mischance;

And mourn not me

Beneath the yellowing tree;

For I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully.

Part 4: Visions and Reverie: The Dreaming Mind

Sleep

John Fletcher

COME, Sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving

Lock me in delight awhile;

Let some pleasing dreams beguile

All my fancies; that from thence

I may feel an influence

All my powers of care bereaving!

Though but a shadow, but a sliding,

Let me know some little joy!

We that suffer long annoy

Are contented with a thought

Through an idle fancy wrought:

O let my joys have some abiding!

The Widow Bird

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A widow bird sate mourning for her Love

Upon a wintry bough;

The frozen wind crept on above,

The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare,

No flower upon the ground,

And little motion in the air

Except the mill-wheel's sound.

All night under the moon

Wilfrid Gibson

All night under the moon

Plovers are flying

Over the dreaming meadows of silvery light,

Over the meadows of June

Calling and crying,

Wandering voices of love in the hush of the night.

All night under the moon

Love, though we are lying

Quietly under the thatch, in the dreaming light

Over the meadows of June

Together we are flying,

Wandering voices of love in the hush of the night.

Comet at Yell'ham

Thomas Hardy

It bends far over Yell’ham Plain,
And we, from Yell’ham Height,
Stand and regard its fiery train,
So soon to swim from sight.

It will return long years hence, when
As now its strange swift shine
Will fall on Yell’ham; but not then
On that sweet form of thine.

Silent Noon

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, -

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour glass.

Deep in the sunsearched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: -

So this winged hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,

This close-companioned inarticulate hour

When twofold silence was the song of love.