Description

In December 1913–January 1914, Ivor Gurney composed his first musical masterpiece: five settings of poems by Elizabethan poets.  Gurney wrote to a friend in early 1914, ‘They are all Elizabethan – the words – and blister my kidneys, bisurate my magnesia if the music is not as English, as joyful, as tender as any lyric of that noble host. [. . .] How did such an undigested clod as I make them?’

The songs have become some of Gurney’s best-known music — indeed, ‘Sleep’ is Gurney’s most frequently performed and recorded work.  However, although well known performed with piano, they were first written with an accompaniment of winds and harp.  Only Gurney’s full score of the final song has survived, and this is reproduced in this score alongside realisations and recreations of the original scoring of the other four songs, inferred from the extant manuscript short/piano scores.  One of those scores includes several annotations regarding the scoring of the third song, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, and this has been realised by the editor.  The remaining songs have been more fully arranged from the extant manuscripts.

Having not been heard with their winds and harp accompaniment since at least 1920, this recreated version of the songs was first performed by Susanna Spicer and an ensemble from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in 2013, marking the centenary of these Five Elizabethan Songs.  The below video introduces this new edition, and includes some extracts from a recording of this 2013 performance.