Concert offers a tribute to music of ‘A Shropshire Lad’
A.E. Housman is a poet whose influence stands in inverse proportion to his output. His renown resides chiefly on one slim volume of poetry called “A Shropshire Lad,” published in 1896. Little noticed when it first appeared, the poems gradually caught the popular imagination. Their unadorned language united an evocation of pastoral England with a bleak vision of the world and intimations of death. The book has never been out of print.
War is a
frequent theme in “A Shropshire Lad,” making Housman’s poems eerily prescient of the atrocities unleashed by the first World War. It’s said that many soldiers went to the trenches with copies of the book in their pockets.
The Florestan Recital Project is devoting Sunday’s program to songs on Housman’s poetry by a wide swath of composers. For tenor Joe Dan Harper, a Florestan cofounder and artistic director, the poetry remains important today for the same reasons that made it so compelling almost a hundred years ago.
“What’s really interesting is that it’s very simple, surface-level poetry, in a lot of ways, and he was criticized for that,” says Harper. “But the appeal has been widespread, and it really resonated with a lot of people during World War I. I’ve been struck by settings of the poetry because of the way it resonates with me, regarding war and issues surrounding war.”
You can find a peculiar marriage of the idyllic and the horrific throughout “A Shropshire Lad.” One poem, beginning with the line “On the idle hill of summer,” starts by evoking the lazy serenity of the British countryside. Quickly, though, the scene is transformed and terror sets in: “East and west on fields forgotten/ Bleach the bones of comrades slain/ Lovely lads and dead and rotten/ None that go return again.”
British composers began to write songs on Housman’s verse shortly after the turn of the century. Many poems, including “On the idle hill of summer,” were set by George Butterworth, who himself was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The Florestan program includes a selection of his songs, as well as settings by such contemporary composers as John Harbison, Jake Heggie, and Daniel Pinkham. Songs by Ned Rorem, Libby Larsen, and Robert Pound will have their first performances.
Harper says that despite the differences in harmonic vocabulary, the simplicity and clear rhythms of Housman’s language lead to affinities among the songs. “The poetry dictates the musical style,” he says, “and because of that, even within the contemporary settings, there’s a lot of similarity.” He assembled the program in chronological order of the poems, rather than grouping them by composer. “It’s my hope that the collage method works in that way and focuses more attention on the poetry itself.”
Harper hopes that the concert, and Housman’s unblinking yet strangely elegant contemplation of the horrors of war, can play a role in bringing about a fuller dialogue about a conflict that just marked its fifth anniversary. It’s a discussion in which he often finds himself having to tread cautiously.
“War is a complicated subject,” he says, “and it’s hard to even have a conversation about it without being considered by some to be against freedom. And I guess what I want, and it’s great if this concert can help, is for people to have a discussion about these issues, without fear of an honest dialogue.”
Sunday at the Boston Conservatory. info@florestanproject.org
Inside Gandolfi’s ‘Garden’
Telarc has just released the first recording of “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” by New England Conservatory composer Michael Gandolfi. The piece, which originated as a commission from the Tanglewood Music Center, was recorded by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and music director Robert Spano, one of the composer’s most enthusiastic proponents.
Gandolfi will mark the release of the CD with a listening party and discussion of the piece at the Boston location of Newbury Comics, which is featuring a nicely stocked selection of classical music these days.
Sunday at 2 p.m., 332 Newbury St. newburycomics.com
Labelle cancels
Having canceled her appearances last weekend with the Handel and Haydn Society because of illness, soprano Dominique Labelle has also withdrawn from this weekend’s concerts in Emmanuel Music’s Schumann series. She was to have sung Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39, with pianist Robert Merfeld. She will be replaced in that work by longtime Emmanuel soprano Jayne West.
emmanuelmusic.org
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