Flowers of the Field Roderick Williams

• 1 A Shropshire Lad 10:22
• 2 I. Prelude 05:20
• 3 II. How Still This Quiet Cornfield Is To-Night 09:14
• 4 III. Only a Man Harrowing Clods 03:37
• 5 IV. We Who Are Left 04:18
• 6 The Trumpet 05:45
• 7 An Oxford Elegy 22:01
• Total Runtime 01:00:37

Info for Flowers of the Field

These composers were all affected by the carnage of World War I, and their elegiac music expresses regret and lost innocence, love won and lost, sacrifice and death. George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, conceived as an epilogue to his Housman song cycles, encapsulates the poet’s sense of life’s transience. Ivor Gurney was both shot and gassed in 1917, and The Trumpet pleads with mankind to set aside the folly of war. Heard here in a new completion, Gerald Finzi’s Requiem da Camera mourns the death of his mentor.

Ernest Farrar and those of other fallen artists, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy recalls lost friends with an intense and magical nostalgia.

“To mark Remembrance Day this disc collects works by English composers affected by the first world war. Unlike their compatriot poets, the composers responded with uniformly elegiac feelings.” (Financial Times)

“this version [of the Requiem da Camera], intelligently paced by Hilary Davan Wetton with Roderick Williams as the matchless baritone soloist, is a significant addition to the Finzi catalogue...it’s the Finzi especially that makes the disc so worthwhile.” (The Guardian)

Roderick Williams, baritone (on track 4)
Jeremy Irons, speaker (on track 7)
City of London Choir on tracks 3, 5, 7)
London Mozart Players
Hilary Davan Wetton, conductor

Recorded in Henry Wood Hall, London, UK, on 11th and 12th July, 2014
Engineered by Mike Clements
Produced and edited by Andrew Walton (K&A Productions Ltd.)

Roderick Williams
sings a wide repertoire, from baroque to contemporary music, in the opera house, on the concert platform, and in recital. He has performed in all the major opera houses in the United Kingdom and is particularly associated with the baritone rôles of Mozart. He has also sung world premières of operas by David Sawer, Sally Beamish, Michael van der Aa, Robert Saxton and Alexander Knaifel. Williams sings concert repertoire with all the BBC orchestras as well as the Bournemouth Symphony, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Russian National Orchestra, and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, among many others. His festival appearances include the BBC Proms, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Aldeburgh and Melbourne. Roderick Williams is also a composer and has had works performed at the Barbican Centre, the Purcell Room, and Wigmore Hall.

Booklet for Flowers of the Field