Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.
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The First World War didn’t just decimate a whole generation; those who survived were shaken to their very cores. A great deal of music and poetry of the time expresses a sense of lives wasted. Others, however, chose to reflect and deflect, conjuring enigmatic images of a bygone pastoral age (and that despite AE Houseman’s bitter reflections on England’s 'blue remembered hills'.)
Not unsurprisingly, war gave a jolt to what in 1914 were already burgeoning schools of musical nationalism, impacting composers from Sibelius in the north to Granados in the south (the latter dying in 1916 when his ship was torpedoed in the English Channel). German music, on the other hand, was widely banned abroad. Music lovers on all sides were left hankering for the non-partisan and often fantastical vistas of Romanticism’s heyday.
Of those who served and lived to tell the tale, both Ralph Vaughan Williams and Maurice Ravel were changed for good. As a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, the English composer was posted to Arras in 1915 where, as a wagon orderly, he ferried the sick and wounded in a field ambulance. Having failed to get into the fledgling French Air Force, Ravel joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver in 1915, dodging German shells to deliver ammunition. Unlike Vaughan Williams, whose creativity returned in the 1920s, Ravel, his health undermined by dysentery and frostbite, never fully recovered.
It was an equally traumatic time for musicians unable to play an active role. Diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 1909, Claude Debussy was too ill to do more than shuffle from pillar to post hoping to avoid German incursions. Although he’d started the war expressing pride in never having handled a gun, by 1918 he was signing his final works with a patriotic flourish: 'Claude Debussy, musicien français'.
Sir Edward Elgar, 57 when war broke out, was too old to serve. Nevertheless, England’s senior composer signed up as a special constable and later joined the Hampstead Volunteer Reserve. Throughout the conflict, he oscillated between a half-hearted nationalism and privately expressed misery.
Born in 1873, the German composer Max Reger was also in poor health. His initial thought was to commemorate the fallen with some kind of Requiem but settled in the end for Acht geistliche Gesänge (Eight Sacred Songs), published in 1916 following his death from a heart attack. Nachtlied is the third, a setting of 16th-century theologian Petrus Herbert. The words pray that we may lie down in the protection of God’s angels and arise refreshed. Reger’s chromatically intense music nods backwards to Bach’s motets.
There’s a similarly nostalgic ache about Debussy’s Trois chansons. Published in 1908, they seem to anticipate France’s wartime longing for less complicated times. The texts, by the 15th-century Charles, Duke of Orleans, hint at deeper themes below the polished surfaces. In the swooning Dieu! Qui l’a fait bon regarder, for example, the poet’s mistress stands for France herself. The angular chromaticism of Yver, vous n’estes qu’un villain suggests the year’s least hospitable season, while in the cheeky Quand j’ai ouy le tambourin sonner a trio of voices imitate a medieval Provencal drum.
Gazing backwards, Franz Schubert’s Flucht would have appealed to wartime artists, wedding as it does Romantic pastoral imagery to the 19th-century German idea of Sehnsucht, or longing (in this case a hunger for freedom). Karl Lappe’s poetry juxtaposes the inescapable gravity of the coffin with man’s eternal struggle for light and air. In a perky march, Schubert uses repeating lines and increasing contrapuntal complexity to ratchet up the tension.
A similar yearning haunts Brahms’ Vineta, the second of his 1860 Drei Gesänge. Wilhelm Müller’s poem tells of a legendary sunken city off the coast of Pomerania with a Lorelei-like power to draw passing mariners into the depths. Brahms deploys an overpowering sweetness and a lilting rhythm to depict bells swaying beneath the waves, while harmonic shifts warn of danger and deception.
Vaughan Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs were written by the 78-year-old composer as test pieces in 1951. However, they anything but simple. The first two songs, with words taken from The Tempest, inhabit the musical landscape of his Sixth Symphony—sometimes interpreted as a commentary on a brave new post-WWII world. Full fathom five exploits the very English sound of church bells ringing out beneath the waves, but Vaughan Williams harmonic language builds in complexity as it pushes towards the words 'rich and strange'. The cloud-capp’d towers echoes the enigmatic emptiness of the symphony’s pianissimo finale, once likened by the composer to Prospero’s 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on' speech in the play. Over hill, over dale, its words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, provides a fleet-footed, fairylike finale.
Composed at the height of the Second World War in 1942, the motet Valiant-for-Truth is a setting from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Vaughan Williams’ very favourite books. With modal echoes of Anglican psalmody, we hear how Mr Valiant-for-Truth crosses the river to be welcomed into the Celestial City, ending with a tumble of voices emulating peals of trumpets.
Written in 1885, Saint-Saëns’ Saltarelle celebrates wine, women and song with sly, scampering 6/8 rhythms that hark back to the 15th-century Italian dance from which it takes its name. Thirty years later the composer would be in a considerably sourer mood leading a vitriolic wartime campaign to outlaw performances of German music in France (when Debussy refused to sanction such a ban, his music in turn was declared de trop).
No composer was more completely associated with Britain’s war effort than Elgar. Confidentially, however, he was increasingly disillusioned and despairing. Death on the hills, written the year war broke out, is typical. Set to the muffled tread of a dead march, the grim reaper leads victims, young and old, across a dusky countryside. It was no one off, however. Seven years earlier he had written Owls, a nihilistic meditation with words by the composer himself. Musically it’s as modernist as Elgar ever got, full of rule-breaking harmonic shifts and haunting chromatics. Deep in my soul, a setting of Byron, is cast in a similarly sepulchral mould, a bleak plea for remembrance by a nameless unrequited lover.
Written late in 1914, Trois chansons was Ravel’s direct response to the outbreak of hostilities, each song dedicated to a friend he hoped might support his efforts to enlist. The composer wrote the texts himself, like Debussy seeking inspiration in the 16th-century French chanson. Each one deals with loss, though in very different ways. The carefree Nicolette, for, example, loses her virtue when she sells herself to a portly old lord (though she successfully avoids a grumpy wolf and a lascivious pageboy). The Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis represent the colours of the French flag. Set to radiant music, the first brings a pair of blue eyes, the second a kiss for a snow white brow and the third the lover’s bleeding heart fresh from the battlefield. Ronde, a whirligig tongue twister, opens with gossipy old men and women warning children to avoid the dangers lurking in the woods and ends with the youngsters lamenting how the oldies have frightened all the magical beings away.
No one did more to popularise 19th-century German music abroad than Felix Mendelssohn whose high-Romantic outlook was shared by his gifted sister Fanny. The latter’s Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald is a tranquil evening hymn offering hope that all who have laboured will find rest as the sun sets over rustic valley and woods. Felix’s Hebe deine Augen auf zu den Bergen is equally soothing. A luminous setting of Psalm 121 (I will lift up my eyes unto the hills), the music is taken from Elijah, England’s most popular oratorio, where it is sung by three angels.
As Vaughan Williams was to England, so Hugo Alfvén was to Sweden. Like his British counterpart, the Swede was an avid arranger of folksongs, expressing a national mood through pastoral themes common across Europe. Uti vår hage hails from 1923. A lilting folksong from the island of Gotland, it expresses the joys of springtime and a hoped for tryst. From 1941, Och jungfrun hon går i ringen is a waltzing round dance that ends with a posse of huntsmen searching for a saucy lad who has hopped it with a local maiden. Aftonen, written the following year, sings of sundown, shepherds and verdant hillsides, its serene progress replete with voices imitating hunting horns.
As the musical spirit of Finland’s legends and landscape, Jean Sibelius stands supreme. The enormous success in 1900 of his tone poem Finlandia, a musical representation of national struggle and eventual triumph, led the composer to set it as a standalone hymn in 1927. Outside of Finland, Christian congregations were quick to embrace its stirring tune, wrapping it around the consoling Lutheran hymn Be still, my soul.
Clive Paget © 2025
Music from the 19th and 20th centuries has not been the sole focus of one of our albums for 30 years, since Nightsong in 1995. In some ways, this repertoire is a less obvious fit for our particular vocal forces. In the 19th century in particular, the leading lights of European music were focussed on large-scale orchestral works, chamber music and art song. What choral music there was, was commonly conceived for the grand choral societies, festival choruses or amateur chamber choirs which sprung up during the period, rather than for single voice ensembles like ours. This can present some challenges to us in how the music is conceived, not least finding a way to breathe for the very long phrases. The countertenor voice was also in something of a period of hibernation at this time—it was heard in church choirs, but rarely, if ever, in concert—with composers favouring the drama of the contralto in the same vocal range. Despite all this, there is still so much repertoire in which we feel we have something to say. And through this album we hope that our interpretations may add a new perspective on some familiar music.
For us, the album has been a chance to develop and exercise new and different colours in our singing, to dive deeply into text-centric interpretations and historical context, to savour and cherish the four languages in which we sing here, and—in one instance—even to expand our forces a little. As we were developing the track-list, Vaughan Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs revealed themselves as a centrepiece, and after some unsuccessful experiments in making eight parts fit into six voices we invited leading consort sopranos Grace Davidson and Victoria Meteyard to join us, creating a bigger choral texture befitting the repertoire. As close members of the King’s Singers family, they joined us with a clear understanding of our sound and style, and fitted perfectly on to the top of our texture.
Our experience recording the album took us into the exact type of English idyll that Vaughan Williams or Elgar might have known. We recorded at St Nicholas’ Church, Kemerton—a village in the Cotswolds full of sand-coloured stone cottages, surrounded by farmland and centred around a thriving pub and beautiful parish church, with a grand rectory to one side. It’s a village largely untouched by the shiniest and loudest bits of modern life, and we’re pleased that the album has even captured in places some of the birdsong that provides a soundtrack to Cotswolds life.
We’d like to thank the rector and church wardens of St Nicholas’ Church for welcoming us so warmly there. We’d like to thank Christopher Glynn for his advice and inspiration in coaching us on some of the repertoire as we prepared to record. We’d like to thank Nick Parker and Tom Lewington for their patience and care in producing and engineering the album, and to everyone at Signum Records for helping us bring it to life. We’d also like to thank our language coaches, Gerhard Schroeder, Perrine Malgouyres, and Emmanuel Roll, for their help in sharpening up our pronunciation in German, French and Swedish.
The King's Singers © 2025