The Contrast: English Poetry in Song (SACD Album) – William Walton

Song composition has been a constant in British music since the lute and consort works of the early seventeenth century. By 1900, it had developed into a sophisticated genre embraced by almost all serious composers. The music on this amply-filled disc illustrates the diversity of British song-writing and its transformation over a century: from Vaughan Williams’s ‘Orpheus and his Lute’ (ca 1901) to Huw Watkins’s ‘Five Larkin Songs’, composed in 2010 for Carolyn Sampson, who performs them here.