The Past & I: of Thomas Hardy
100 Years
Lotte Betts-Dean
Ligeti Quartet
James Girling
MusicandarrangementsbyArthurKeegan
Arthur Keegan (b. 1986)
The Past & I:
100 Years
of Thomas Hardy
Music and arrangements by Arthur Keegan
Lotte Betts-Dean
mezzo-soprano (tracks 1–16, 18, 20, 22, 24–25)
James Girling guitar (tracks 1–8, 10–15)
Ligeti Quartet (tracks 8–9, 16–25)
Freya Goldmark violin 1
Patrick Dawkins violin 2
Richard Jones viola Val Welbanks cello
Tracks 1–7, 11–12, 15 & 17–25 are premiere recordings
Tracks 8–10, 13–14 & 16 are premiere recordings in these arrangements
Recorded on 28-30 November 2023 at St Mark’s
Portobello, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mixing & mastering: Paul Baxter
Cover image: Georgie Fay, Avebury Stones / www.georgiefay.com
Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com
Design: Eliot Garcia
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd
Elegies for Emma
I. Days to Recollect (part 1)
II. The Walk
III. Rain on a Grave
Interlude: I look into my glass
IV. The Voice
V. She to Him
VI. Days to Recollect (part 2) [2:41]
Derek Holman (1931–2019) arr. Arthur Keegan Midnight on the Great Western [2:53]
Muriel Herbert (1897–1984) arr. Arthur Keegan Faintheart in a Railway Train [1:25]
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) arr. Arthur Keegan At the Railway Station, Upway [3:28]
Imogen Holst (1907–1984) arr. Arthur Keegan Weathers [1:51]
Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) arr. Arthur Keegan In the Black Winter Morning [2:58]
Robin Milford (1903–1959) arr. Arthur Keegan If It’s Ever Spring Again [1:21]
Gerald Finzi (1901–1956) arr. Arthur Keegan The Too Short Time [3:16]
Kerry Andrew (b. 1978) The Echo Elf Answers [6:01]
Gerald Finzi arr. Arthur Keegan Shortening Days [3:09]
Arthur Keegan String Quartet No 1 ‘Elegies for Tom’
I. Delicate-filmed, as new-spun silk 1st Interlude
II. An eyelid’s soundless blink 2nd Interlude
III. Nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm 3rd Interlude
IV. Full-starred heavens that winter sees 4th Interlude
V. A new bell’s boom
In the preface to his catalogue of works, and in a mood to contemplate his legacy, Gerald Finzi wrote that ‘to shake hands with a good friend over the centuries is a pleasant thing’. Finzi had recently been diagnosed with incurable Hodgkin’s disease, and was considering – with a kind of bleak stoicism – what hold his work might have on the future. He invokes a question posed by Thomas Hardy, a poet whose words he set at least fifty times: ‘Why do I go on doing these things?’ By way of a response, Finzi suggests that ‘some curious force compels us to preserve and project into the future the essence of our individuality, and, in doing so … something of our age and civilisation’.
Hardy himself was equally concerned with the ‘afterwards’ of his work: in his poem of that name he muses, hopefully, on his afterlife in the memories of others. Hardy’s legacy – his ‘afterwards’ – hovers in both benign and melancholy form over the whole of the present album. The project was triggered, appropriately enough, by a series of links between poet and composers stretching across more than a hundred years. During a 2019 residency at The Red House, the former home of Benjamin Britten, Arthur Keegan found himself diverted from writing an orchestral work when he learned of an intriguing series of connections. He was shown a letter from Hardy to Gustav Holst
dated October 1909, thanking him for setting three of his poems. This letter, kept inside a book of Hardy’s verse, was bequeathed after Holst’s death to his daughter Imogen, who later presented it to Britten as a gift in 1952.
The following year, Britten set several of Hardy’s poems in his cycle Winter Words.
Increasingly drawn to Hardy’s verse, Keegan ended up not only composing the two works that frame the current programme – two substantial sets of ‘Elegies’ which respond in different ways to the poet’s life and work – but also exploring the vast number of existing Hardy settings (over three hundred were already listed in a book published in 1976), eventually arranging a selection for voice with guitar and/or string quartet. While there are no settings by Gustav here, both Imogen and Britten are represented, thus recalling the original point of inspiration while expanding outwards to build a brilliantly diverse group of songs that reach back and forth through time, enacting multiple friendly handshakes across the century leading from Hardy’s era into our own.
Hardy’s poetic preoccupations are well represented in Keegan’s selection. The big one – Time, its relentless passing – is thematically present nearly everywhere, but notably in the two Finzi settings (indeed, the composer changed the original title of the
poem ‘The Best She Could’ to The Too Short Time) and as an idée fixe in Ivor Gurney’s In the Black Winter Morning. Naturally enough, too, time as a repository of memory and loss is the dominating motif of both of Keegan’s sets of Elegies
The natural world figures almost as often – notably in the observations of birds and other creatures in the settings by Finzi, Holst and Robin Milford – and usually against the backdrop of the changing seasons (the passing of time, again): autumn remembering summer in Finzi; a yearning for spring in Milford; the blackness of the winter in Gurney. The mood is not, however, relentlessly bleak. Hardy maintains a bracing, existential acceptance of time’s inevitable onward march, and the musical settings are rarely sombre to the point of desolation. One of the more playful – and the only track not arranged by Keegan – is Kerry Andrew’s The Echo Elf Answers, a mordant riddle displaying the composer’s characteristic mix of folk-infused art song and the uncanny.
A further, perhaps initially surprising theme is the presence of trains, in a self-contained ‘railway trilogy’. In fact, time and the natural world run alongside the railway tracks. Hardy was keenly aware that while the railway networks had the ability to link the more remote, rural parts of the country together,
a journey which would normally take hours or days to walk or ride is brutally truncated; time and physical space thus lose their affinity. Furthermore, the ‘natural’ instincts of human beings, moulded only by the passing of the seasons, are subject to timetables and to an abrupt temporal displacement. Faster transportation is, then, shackling rather than liberating: the three ‘railway’ poems here speak to that in various ways, as well as suggesting the unsettling speed of ‘progress’. The natural world is again brought up against a brutal, mechanised future in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Mower’, which responds obliquely to Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’ in a further ‘handshake’; the two texts are intercut in Keegan’s Elegies for Tom
All the songs arranged by Keegan are originally for voice and piano. In terms of the instruments chosen for the new accompaniments, the guitar is perhaps a nod both back and forward in time; it lends a touch of the Renaissance lute song, yet simultaneously a spare, twenty-first-century edge. Its portability may even provide an outdoorsy element: less concert-hall, more musicians gathering where they may. (Hardy himself was a competent fiddler, a member with his father and uncle of a small ‘band’ that regularly accompanied country dances in barns and farm buildings.) Keegan deploys the more conventional ‘art music’ accompaniment
of string quartet for other songs, but his use of the ensemble is non-traditional – at times simply generating a world of ‘effect’, at others marking meditative time. At the end of Elegies for Tom, the quartet becomes a ‘bell of quittance … heard in the gloom’.
Keegan’s Elegies for Emma remembers, and gives voice to, Hardy’s first wife. It is a through-composed cycle, navigating geographical places and memories, based largely on poems Hardy wrote shortly after Emma’s death. As many biographers have noted, Hardy showed her little patience in life, but after her death – and despite making a new life with his second wife, Florence – he poured regret, guilt and love into a series of poems.
Particularly in the framing ‘Days to Recollect’, Keegan is acutely aware of this retrospective re-envisioning of the past, and was keen to include at least a trace of Emma’s own voice (which is otherwise hard to find – Hardy destroyed her diary, entitled ‘What I Think of My Husband’, after her death). She is given words here, as well as folksong from her native Cornwall, counterbalancing some of Hardy’s solipsism. In ‘The Walk’ the poem is more about the griever than the grieved; Keegan amplifies the presence of the imagined interlocutor by building the setting around an accusatory augmented fourth
(at ‘You did not walk with me’ and elsewhere). ‘Rain on a Grave’ begins feverishly with hammering ‘rain’ in the guitar’s repeated notes. Gradually, however, it responds to Hardy’s contagious rhyming scheme in the central verses, drawing a folk-like song from the singer, caught initially in a selfless desire to swap places with the dead, then to be joined together. (The repetition of ‘heart’ is perhaps significant: as Hardy’s own funeral notice sixteen years later revealed, ‘his heart was buried with his wife Emma … as had been his wish’.)
An earlier poem, ‘I look into my glass’, is a different kind of mourning: for a less infirm frame, a younger self. The singer intones rather than sings, lending the setting a curiously ritual quality over its gradually decaying accompaniment. As the poet regrets the ‘throbbing’ of this younger self which can’t, or won’t, be accommodated by the ageing body, the guitar’s E string slides down to D sharp – an empathetic slackening of the fibres. This scordatura effect remains for the next two songs. And increasing fragmentation is a feature of ‘The Voice’: after the first three lines, Keegan only dips in and out of the text, the singer getting stuck on various phrases. The central image of ‘the breeze’ (evocatively imitated at one point) symbolises the loosening of the woman’s voice from the earthly plain.
The somewhat ominous motif from ‘I look into my glass’ returns in the next song, initially in that eerily low register, though the guitar gradually tunes back up to ‘normal’ during the course of this song. Once again the text fragments, but allows for Emma to return, taking part in this ‘She, to Him’ as a real rather than imagined voice. In the final song (the second half of ‘Days to Recollect’) she reprises her Cornish folksong, in English this time, and the conclusion is subtly infused with recollections of the whole cycle (the ‘rain’ from ‘Rain on a Grave’, scraps of melody from ‘The Voice’). It is a deeply moving dialogue between the living and the dead, the matter-of-fact statement of loss (‘I never more did see you’) and the ghostly folksong leading to the imploring ‘Say you remember / That sad November’. Emma Hardy née Gifford died on 27 November 1912.
The network of associations around Hardy and song thickens further, travelling into the future by way of Muriel Herbert and her daughter, Hardy’s future biographer Claire Tomalin. Herbert’s career as a composer flourished briefly in her own time – partly thanks to the advocacy of Roger Quilter, who helped get some of her songs published. Tomalin supported the preservation and performance of her songs many decades later. Faintheart in a Railway Train dates from around the time of Herbert’s short-lived
marriage to Émile Delavenay, its dedicatee. The brief setting paints a vivid picture with sophisticated economy of means: a repeated semiquaver figure, suggesting the onward journey of the train, intercut with free-style vocal passages, blossoming (particularly in this quartet arrangement) briefly into rhapsody before a tellingly abrupt ending.
A song from Britten’s aforementioned Winter Words cycle takes us to the Railway Station, Upway (in Dorset; also known as ‘Upwey’), where a motley crew of passengers is waiting on the platform. A child plays the violin for his supper, to an audience of a shackled convict and his guard. The boy’s pennilessness is briefly, poetically linked with the convict’s forthcoming imprisonment, the latter singing with ‘grimful glee’ about freedom as the boy strums his violin – perhaps a picture of a young Hardy. (In her biography, Tomalin draws an evocative picture of the poet as a boy: ‘the fiddler’s son, with music in his blood and bone … dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious, ecstatic’.) Britten’s imitation of the violin, originally on the piano, is given particular immediacy on the guitar – a more portable, ‘buskable’ instrument than a concert grand.
Another young boy is the subject of the other ‘railway’ song, Derek Holman’s Midnight on the Great Western. Holman’s setting is
in a deceptively simple ABA format, with the ‘B’ section comprising the poet’s speculation about his fellow traveller’s past, and what could have led him to be journeying alone. The outer ‘A’ sections are lyrical, dance-like, given an almost salon-like grace by the combination of quartet and guitar. The central ‘B’ section, meanwhile, is discordant and disturbing, the author unconsciously attributing a painful, violent tale to the boy’s solitary status.
Firmly outdoors, and away from all modern invention, Imogen Holst’s Weathers –composed when she was only nineteen – is especially well suited to its guitar arrangement. In a rolling, dance-like 6/8 time it resembles a Renaissance lute song, capturing beautifully the poem’s time-outof-time depiction of men, women and other creatures equally at one with the changing seasons. Holst’s minor mode, and, solitary ‘so do I’ towards the end, hints (Hardyishly) at the brevity of it all.
Gurney’s In the Black Winter Morning is also in 6/8, and similarly dance-like to begin with. Gurney composed the song while in a psychiatric hospital, and it remained for years among his unpublished works. The verse speaks deeply of grief and loss of the beloved, but it is initially held within this lilting style. Gradually, the harmony slides flatwards; seemingly influenced by the tolling effect
of ‘the time is the time of his tread’, the voice sinks to its lowest point to rhyme ‘of the dead’. The pulse slows, and the voice fragments, leaving a poignant gap between ‘hard’ and ‘Would ’twere underground’. The lilting melody returns on the guitar, a wisp of memory.
Robin Milford, like Gurney, was no stranger to mental suffering. He was badly affected by his brief experience enlisting in World War II, and later by the tragic death of his young son, and took his own life in the late 1950s. His setting of If It’s Ever Spring Again is a characteristic poetic blend of nostalgia and projecting forwards, but is infectiously charming, dancing its way towards the longed-for warmth of spring and summer.
Moving on, seasonally, in Finzi’s Shortening Days regret at the passing of summer is balanced by the compensatory cider-maker with his assertive march into autumn. The song eases slowly into itself, the original single-stave line in the piano transplanted into string harmonics and brief rustles of sound. (The increasingly Vaughan Williamsish harmonies have a particular frisson in this arrangement, as if a lark is about to ascend from the violin section.) Sorrowfulness, which permeates the whole album, is gentle here. The Too Short Time also observes the shift from summer to autumn and has a
similar buoyancy, defying the falling leaves (lightly depicted on the guitar) and ending on a sweetly harmonised cadence.
Kerry Andrew’s The Echo Elf Answers, commissioned by Keegan for this project, is mischievous, eerie, full of the impish power of the ‘echo elf’. The guitarist ‘knocks’ at the door, as the singer seeks answers in classic folk-tale manner. The answers are, of course, contained within the question. But the elf replies in sinister tones, ultimately taunting the foolish questioner with its echoes, pointedly repeating the word ‘wrong’ over and again as the singer trills and fades away like a defeated Narcissus.
In Elegies for Tom, Keegan turns his focus from Emma Hardy to the poet himself. The work as a whole is a string quartet, with optional ‘interludes’ for voice, and the instrumental movements take their lead from evocative lines of ‘Afterwards’. The music comprises a series of shifting textures, anchored initially by a chord heard in the first bar. This chord is gentle, yet with a dissonance at its core, a throbbing minor second. Six further chords, forming a solemn chaconne, progress through the work, rotating in sequence. The vocal interludes are responses in two senses: from the singer, to the quartet movements, and from Larkin, to the underlying Hardy poem. The
protagonist of ‘Afterwards’ worries for the future of an ‘innocent’ hedgehog, travelling ‘furtively’ over the lawn. He is right to – the poor thing finds itself trapped in the blades of Larkin’s ‘Mower’. Mourning the creature, feeling in particular the sharp edge of grief on ‘the first day after a death’, Larkin takes on Hardy’s maxim of care: ‘… we should be kind / While there is still time.’ The chord from the start of the quartet is revealed as Time itself – tolling, bell-like, until the close of the piece, echoing in the afterwards.
© 2024 Lucy Walker
Lucy Walker is a freelance writer and speaker specialising in the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She worked for many years at The Red House in Aldeburgh, and her PhD (King’s College London, 2005) was on the operas of Francis Poulenc. She has edited two books on Benjamin Britten, and is the coeditor of Maconchy in Context for Cambridge University Press (forthcoming in 2025).
1–7 Elegies for Emma
Days to Recollect
Do you recall
That day in Fall
When we walked towards Saint Alban’s Head, On thistledown that summer had shed, Or must I remind you?
Winged thistle-seeds which hitherto Had lain as none were there, or few, But rose at the brush of your petticoat-seam (As ghosts might rise of the recent dead), And sailed on the breeze in a nebulous stream
Like a comet’s tail behind you: You don’t recall That day in Fall?
Then do you remember That sad November
When you left me never to see me more, And looked quite other than theretofore, As if it could not be you?
And lay by the window whence you had gazed So many times when blamed or praised, Morning or noon, through years and years, Accepting the gifts that Fortune bore, Sharing, enduring, joys, hopes, fears!
Well: I never more did see you. –
Say you remember That sad November!
The Walk
You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days; You were weak and lame, So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.
I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way; Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again: What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.
Rain on a Grave
Clouds spout upon her
Their waters amain
In ruthless disdain, –Her who but lately
Had shivered with pain
As at touch of dishonour
If there had lit on her So coldly, so straightly
Such arrows of rain:
One who to shelter
Her delicate head
Would quicken and quicken
Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her
That summertime spills
In dust-paven rills
When thunder-clouds thicken And birds close their bills.
Would that I lay there
And she were housed here! Or better, together Were folded away there
Exposed to one weather
We both, – who would stray there
When sunny the day there, Or evening was clear
At the prime of the year.
Soon will be growing Green blades from her mound, And daisies be showing Like stars on the ground, Till she form part of them –Ay – the sweet heart of them, Loved beyond measure With a child’s pleasure
All her life’s round.
I look into my glass I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, ‘Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then, I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.
The Voice
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness, Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, And the woman calling.
She, to Him
When you shall see me in the toils of Time, My lauded beauties carried off from me, My eyes no longer stars as in their prime, My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;
When, in your being, heart concedes to mind, And judgment, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined, And you are irked that they have withered so;
Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame, That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same One who would die to spare you touch of ill!
Will you not grant to old affection’s claim The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?
Midnight on the Great Western
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy, And the roof-lamp’s oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face, Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going, Or whence he came.
In the band of his hat the journeying boy
Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box, That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
Like a living thing.
What past can be yours, O journeying boy
Towards a world unknown, Who calmly, as if incurious quite On all at stake, can undertake This plunge alone?
Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy, Our rude realms far above, Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete
This region of sin that you find you in, But are not of?
Faintheart in a Railway Train
At nine in the morning there passed a church, At ten there passed me by the sea, At twelve a town of smoke and smirch, At two a forest of oak and birch, And then, on a platform, she:
A radiant stranger, who saw not me. I queried, ‘Get out to her do I dare?’
But I kept my seat in my search for a plea, And the wheels moved on. O could it but be That I had alighted there!
At the Railway Station, Upway
‘There is not much that I can do, For I’ve no money that’s quite my own!’
Spoke up the pitying child –
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, –
‘But I can play my fiddle to you, And a nice one ’tis, and good in tone!’
The man in the handcuffs smiled; The constable looked, and he smiled too, As the fiddle began to twang; And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee:
‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’
And the constable smiled, and said no word, As if unconscious of what he heard; And so they went on till the train came in –The convict, and boy with the violin.
Weathers
This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly; And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at ‘The Traveller’s Rest’, And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I.
This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns, And thresh and ply; And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe, And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.
Bereft [‘In the Black Winter Morning’]
In the black winter morning
No light will be struck near my eyes
While the clock in the stairway is warning For five, when he used to rise.
Leave the door unbarred, The clock unwound,
Make my lone bed hard –
Would ’twere underground!
When the summer dawns clearly, And the appletree-tops seem alight, Who will undraw the curtain and cheerly Call out that the morning is bright?
When I tarry at market
No form will cross Durnover Lea
In the gathering darkness, to hark at Grey’s Bridge for the pit-pat o’ me.
When the supper crock’s steaming, And the time is the time of his tread, I shall sit by the fire and wait dreaming In a silence as of the dead. Leave the door unbarred, The clock unwound, Make my lone bed hard –Would ’twere underground!
If It’s Ever Spring Again
If it’s ever spring again, Spring again, I shall go where went I when Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen, Seeing me not, amid their flounder, Standing with my arm around her; If it’s ever spring again, Spring again, I shall go where went I then.
If it’s ever summer-time, Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime, And the cuckoos – two – in rhyme, As they used to be, or seemed to, We shall do as long we’ve dreamed to, If it’s ever summer-time, Summer-time, With the hay, and bees achime.
The Best She Could [‘The Too Short Time’]
The Echo Elf Answers
Nine leaves a minute
Swim down shakily; Each one fain would spin it
Straight to earth; but, see, How the sharp airs win it
Slantwise away! – Here it say,
‘Now we have finished our summer show Of what we knew the way to do: Alas, not much! But, as things go, As fair as any. And night-time calls, And the curtain falls!’
Sunlight goes on shining
As if no frost were here, Blackbirds seem designing Where to build next year; Yet is warmth declining: And still the day seems to say,
‘Saw you how Dame Summer drest?
Of all God taught her she bethought her! Alas, not much! And yet the best She could, within the too short time Granted her prime.’
How much shall I love her?
For life, or not long?
‘Not long.’
Alas! When forget her?
In years, or by June?
‘By June.’
And whom woo I after?
No one, or a throng?
‘A throng.’
Of these shall I wed one
Long hence, or quite soon?
‘Quite soon.’
And which will my bride be?
The right or the wrong?
‘The wrong.’
And my remedy – what kind?
Wealth-wove, or earth-hewn?
‘Earth-hewn.’
Shortening Days at the Homestead
The first fire since the summer is lit, and is smoking into the room:
The sun-rays thread it through, like wooflines in a loom.
Sparrows spurt from the hedge, whom misgivings appal
That winter did not leave last year for ever, after all.
Like shock-headed urchins, spiny-haired, Stand pollard willows, their twigs just bared.
Who is this coming with pondering pace, Black and ruddy, with white embossed, His eyes being black, and ruddy his face, And the marge of his hair like morning frost?
It’s the cider-maker, And appletree-shaker, And behind him on wheels, in readiness, His mill, and tubs, and vat, and press.
17–25
String Quartet No 1 ‘Elegies for Tom’
Afterwards
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?’
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
Philip Larkin’s ‘The Mower’ has not been able to be printed here for reasons of copyright.
Praised by The Guardian for her ‘irrepressible sense of drama and unmissable, urgent musicality’, Lotte Betts-Dean is an Australian mezzo-soprano based in the UK with a wideranging repertoire and a passion for curation, programming and collaborative project development. She is equally at home in chamber music, art song, early music, opera and narration, with a particular focus on new music, having premiered many works from leading international composers.
Operatic engagements include Bayerische Staatsoper (Vlasta – Weinberg, Die Passagierin), Grand Théâtre de Genève (Teacher – Matthew Shlomowitz, Electric Dreams), Muziekgebouw Amsterdam (Irene – Handel, Theodora), State Opera of South Australia (Semichorus – Brett Dean, Hamlet) and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (Narrator – Stravinsky, Perséphone), and she is a regular at festivals across the UK, Europe and Australia, including Oxford Song, Aldeburgh, Leeds Lieder, St Magnus Festival, West Cork Chamber Music, Purbeck Chamber Music and Australian Festival of Chamber Music, as well as venues such as Wigmore Hall and King’s Place, London. Lotte is a frequent collaborator with chamber groups and artists including Explore Ensemble, EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, the Ligeti Quartet, Marsyas Trio, Armida Quartett, accordionist Ryan Corbett,
guitarist Dimitris Soukaras and pianists
Joseph Havlat and George Fu, and has sung with conductors including Vladimir Jurowski, Sir Andrew Davis, Sian Edwards, Susanna Mälkki and Geoffrey Paterson.
Recently named Young Artist of the Year at the 2024 RPS Awards, Lotte is also winner of the ROSL Overseas Prize and Audrey Strange Singer’s Prize (both 2020), Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform (2019), the inaugural New Elizabethan Award of The Musicians’ Company (2018) and the 2017 Peter Hulsen Orchestral Song Prize. She is a Young Artist alumnus of Britten Pears Arts (2022), City Music Foundation (2019) and Oxford Lieder (2020). For Delphian Records she has recorded two other albums – the widely acclaimed Stuart MacRae: Earth, thy cold is keen, released in summer 2023, and Britten: The Complete Canticles, forthcoming in early 2025. She has also recorded music by Philippos Tsalahouris (Naxos), Michael Finnissy (Divine Art / Métier), Catherine Lamb (Another Timbre), Brett Dean (BIS), Berio (Ensemble Q), Katy Abbott (Tall Poppies) and Schubert (Platoon), among others. She studied at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Royal Academy of Music as well as completing a Fellowship at the Australian National Academy of Music, and has been
Associate Artist with Southbank Sinfonia (2018) and Ensemble x.y (2016–20). Lotte is an Ambassador for Donne, a collective of artists supporting women in music, and also regularly records soundtracks for film and TV with London Voices.
The Ligeti Quartet has been at the forefront of modern and contemporary music since its formation in 2010, breaking new ground through innovative programming and championing of today’s most exciting composers and artists. The Quartet’s album Nuc (2023, Mercury KX) – hailed by BBC Music Magazine as ‘an album that continually surprises and enlightens’ – is a celebration of Anna Meredith’s music for string quartet, including arrangements by the quartet’s viola player Richard Jones. Their tour of the album in 2023 was supported by Music in the Round and Arts Council England. Their previous album Songbooks Vol. 1 (2020, Nonclassical), part of a longstanding collaboration with composer Christian Mason, explores the way in which the acoustic properties of the string quartet emulate the human voice through Mason’s use of extended techniques and unique sound-worlds, and was acclaimed by Gramophone for its ‘magnificently vivid performances’ and ‘sheer unadulterated exuberance’.
The quartet named themselves after the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923–2006), inspired by his kaleidoscopic musical outlook and tireless invention. Throughout 2023 the Quartet performed concerts celebrating the 100th anniversary of their namesake’s birth, during which they showcased all of Ligeti’s music for strings (including the premiere of an early duo) and gave the world premieres of fifteen new commissions including Entasis by the composer’s son Lukas Ligeti (supported by Britten Pears Arts, BBC Radio 3, the Vaughan Williams Foundation and Bourgie Hall). Having played at landmark venues around the world including Carnegie Hall, the Curtis Institute, Wigmore Hall, Purcell Room, Barbican Hall and Kings Place, the Quartet also enjoy performing in more unusual venues, including museums, galleries, theatres, pubs, planetariums, a fishing boat, and a cave. They have commissioned many new works and have collaborated with artists from all types of musical backgrounds including Anna Meredith, Xenia Pestova, Elliot Galvin, Kerry Andrew, Laura Jurd, Meilyr Jones, Neil Hannon, Seb Rochford, Shabaka Hutchings, Sean Noonan, Shed Seven and Submotion Orchestra. Recent highlights for the ensemble include performances in Montreal’s Salle Bourgie, for Toronto’s New
Biographies
Music Concerts, and at New York City’s Bang on a Can Festival, and a ‘Ligeti Day’ curated by the Quartet at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival.
James Girling is a highly versatile British guitarist who, raised in the Cotswolds, now lives in Oslo and works internationally. James was tutored by Craig Ogden at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was recently conferred the honour of Associate Artist. He is the only guitarist to have won the RNCM’s prestigious Gold Medal Award.
James has headlined festivals, recorded, and been broadcast live on Radio 3 playing with the BBC Philharmonic, the Hallé, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s Ensemble 10:10. As soloist, he made his Wigmore Hall debut in 2017 and has since performed Joaquín Rodrigo’s concertos alongside orchestras around the UK James’s classical chamber music performances have included King’s Place, Bridgewater Hall, Buxton International Festival, and – in a tango quintet comprising international soloists such as cellist Abel Selaocoe – Chester Music Festival. He is an alumnus of the International Guitar Foundation’s Young Artist Platform, and as one half of Meraki Duo won first prize in the International Chamber Music Competition for Flute & Guitar, held in Spain in 2023.
Strongly influenced by music traditions rooted in improvisation, James also regularly tours and records across a breadth of styles, including with Prohibition-era jazz septet The Easy Rollers and Afrobeat-/Ethiojazz-inspired band Agbeko, who have headlined festivals across mainland Europe and the UK. He is an alumnus of Jazz North’s ‘Northern Line’ and ‘Introduces’ schemes.
James is a published arranger whose works have been commissioned, toured and recorded by the Hallé, vocalist Jacqui Dankworth, guitarist Craig Ogden, composer Andy Scott, and Aquarelle Guitar Quartet with Clarice Assad. An experienced educator, James is a Live Music Now artist, and has also led masterclasses and workshops at the University of Liverpool, Sage Gateshead, Charterhouse School and Dulwich College.
Acknowledgments
Patrons:
Anna & Ian Taylor
Dave Green
David Fay & Rachel Hodgins
James Allen
Neal Farwell
Toby & Marie-Louise Fay
Commissioners:
John Warnes
Marilyn Kinnon
Helen M. Macrae
With deepest thanks to all our early supporters and pre-purchasers of this album via our Kickstarter campaign. We simply wouldn’t have been able to record this disc without you.
Institutional funders:
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Fenton Arts Trust
Vaughan Williams Foundation
Middlesex University
Lennox Berkeley Society
Henry Handel Richardson Society
Robin Milford Trust
Finzi Friends
With thanks for support and advice: Wild Plum Arts, Lucy Schaufer and Christopher Gillett for being a helpful and supportive sounding board and providing the residency (Made at the Red House) where the idea for this album blossomed.
Lucy Walker for hosting an early development concert at The Red House, asking all the right questions, and writing the booklet essay.
The Thomas Hardy Society for support, advice, and promotion of this project.
Edward Rowe and Sarah Tresidder for (timely!) advice on Cornish-language pronunciation.
Lisa Anderson for hosting with the mosting and for emotional support provided by Islay (Lisa’s beautiful border collie).
Music in Country Churches (Phil Burnett), Salon Concerts Highgate (Michelle Berriedale-Johnson) and Music on the Green (Sophie Rocks) for enthusiastically taking on development recitals of this repertoire.
The Red House Archive, Henry Handel Richardson Society, Robin Milford Trust, and the Ivor Gurney Society for crucial input into the arrangements and providing access to manuscripts.
St Mark’s Church for hosting us so well when recording in beautiful Portobello.
With extra thanks, for everything: Mum
Nettie Hennessy David Fay
Stuart MacRae: Earth, thy cold is keen
Lotte Betts-Dean mezzo-soprano, Sequoia
DCD34297
In 2021, entranced by his first encounter with the voice of mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, Stuart MacRae embarked on an extraordinary flurry of compositional activity, completing no fewer than eight vocal works in the space of two years. Sometimes entirely alone, sometimes joined by the composer himself on harmonium or electronics or by the violin-and-cello duo Sequoia (who also contribute two instrumental items), Betts-Dean’s compelling presence is at the very centre of this haunting album.
‘conjures an aural landscape steeped in folk music and medieval lyric, but the result is entirely distinctive and modern … This is music for slow, close listening, beautifully performed’ — The Guardian, August 2023
Our Indifferent Century: Britten | Finzi | Marsey | Ward
Francesca Chiejina soprano, Fleur Barron mezzo-soprano, Natalie Burch piano
DCD34311
In 1914 Thomas Hardy wrote of ‘our indifferent century’; a generation later W.H. Auden urgently sought to fuse the political with the creative. Here, three artists respond to the political and environmental uncertainties of our own day, placing familiar settings of Hardy and Auden by Finzi and Britten alongside new songs and cycles by William Marsey and Joanna Ward. Clear-eyed about the changes and challenges we face, their programme nonetheless offers hope, levity and even a degree of irreverence, and never loses sight of the joy and beauty of nature.
‘Chiejina’s and Burch’s compelling performance is richly mature and painstakingly coloured … Barron’s enunciation is pinpoint-precise’ — BBC Music Magazine, January 2024
Héloïse Werner: Phrases with Colin Alexander cello, Amy Harman bassoon, Calum Huggan percussion, Lawrence Power violin, viola, Laura Snowden guitar DCD34269
Luminous and daring, this celebration of Héloïse Werner’s multifaceted gifts is nourished by rich dualities. Phrases reveals Werner as both singer and composer, as an artist shaped by both her native France and her adopted UK, and as a soloist of captivating individuality who is also an intrepid collaborator. The solos and duos that make up the album comprise five of Werner’s own compositions, four of Georges Aperghis’s avant-garde classic Récitations, and six newly commissioned works, by composers ranging from Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Nico Muhly to Oliver Leith.
‘a soprano of extraordinary range, tone and vocal abilities’ — Gramophone, June 2022, Editor’s ChoiCE
Painted Light
Solem Quartet, Ayanna Witter-Johnson voice DCD34308
This inventively curated album from the ever-exploratory Solem Quartet presents music that is awash with colour. The refined beauty of Edmund Finnis’s Devotions and stained-glass luminosity of Camden Reeves’s The Blue Windows are complemented by works by Lili Boulanger and Henriëtte Bosmans from the early twentieth century, when the depth and vividness of colour in Impressionist paintings seemed to spill into music. A sense of awed wonder before the natural world informs Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Earth, for which the Quartet is joined by the composer as vocalist, while Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now – heard here in an arrangement by the Quartet’s violinist William Newell – provides a delicate lesson in perspective.
‘a thing of beauty … catches your breath for all the right reasons’ — dCS: Only the Music, Classical Choices, October 2023
Lotte Betts-Dean Sequoia
PRESTO Recordings of the Year 2023 –Finalist
PRESTO Editor's choice
Shortlisted at the 2023 Gramophone Awards (Contemporary category)
