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Tippett | Gipps | Browne | Thomas

Iain Burnside piano (tracks 1–12, 16–23) | Craig Ogden guitar (tracks 13–15)

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo**

1 Sonetto XVI [2:21]

2 Sonetto XXXI [1:42]

3 Sonetto XXX [3:49]

4 Sonetto LV [1:59]

5 Sonetto XXXVIII [2:08]

6 Sonetto XXXII [1:31]

7 Sonetto XXIV [4:23]

Ruth Gipps (1921–1999) Four Songs of Youth*

Failure [2:37]

Unfortunate [2:44]

Peace 1914 [3:07] 12 W. Denis Browne (1888–1915) To Gratiana dancing and singing (Pavan) [3:59]

Michael Tippett (1905–1998) Songs for Achilles

13 I. In the Tent [5:15]

14 II. Across the Plain [3:43]

15 III. By the Sea [6:37]

Elgan Llŷr Thomas (b. 1990) Swan*

Recorded on 22-24 November 2022 at St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Piano: Steinway model D, serial no 600443 (2016)

Piano technician: Norman Motion

Cover photograph © Cody Murray

Booklet design: Drew Padrutt

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords

@ delphianrecords

@ delphian_records

16 ii. my first time in water [1:16] i. the lake is calm tonight [2:15] 17 iii. then the year everything was swan [1:26] iv. the black swan of debt [1:11] v. then the year everything was darkness [2:11] vi. ‘sing a swan of sixpence’ [1:11] vii [queen]. mother don’t eat me [3:05] viii. I plucked each feather from myself [3:55]

Total playing time [63:58]

* premiere recording

** premiere recording in this version

For my dear uncle Arfon – his love for music was boundless and he would have treasured this album … although he’d have been disappointed that there were no Elvis covers. Cysga’n dawel.

And

there the shadowed waters fresh

Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.

— Rupert Brooke, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’

[…] there is only one place I want to be in at the moment & that is just where you are. Why shouldn’t I recognise that you are such a large part of my life?

— Letter from Peter Pears to Benjamin Britten, 16 February 1959

The official premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo took place at the Wigmore Hall in September 1942, with Peter Pears singing and Britten on the piano. It is fascinating to imagine the scene: ardent poetry – written by Michelangelo to the nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri – set to equally ardent music, composed by Britten for his partner, performed to a London audience during the middle of World War II, twentyfive years before homosexuality was even partially decriminalised in England and Wales. To a certain degree, the explicitly passionate text was carefully stowed within its Italian Renaissance baggage – at a safe historical distance, and in a ‘poetic’ language. In Jeremy Sams’ new English singing version, the words are given a declarative, and unambiguous, charge. The sentiments are unveiled, indeed, and passionately expressed. Yet the new text also hints at the strictures under which gay men were living at the time – ‘Why are we wary when we say hello?’, reads a line in ‘Sonetto LV’ – and the present album as a whole traverses a history of male homosexuality from necessary discretion to the (relatively) liberated present. Britten, Pears and their friend and colleague Michael Tippett lived much of their lives before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 (the outcome – eventually – of the findings of the Wolfenden Report in 1957). Still earlier in the twentieth century, Rupert Brooke, whose poetry is set by Ruth Gipps here, had affairs with and attracted the devotion of both men and women – movingly so in the case of Denis Browne, his close friend who was with him at his death. Queer artists from even earlier make appearances, too: Michelangelo, but also Tchaikovsky, in a striking musical cameo in Elgan Llŷr Thomas’s own song-cycle Swan.

In a review of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 novel The Swimming-Pool Library, the writer and critic John Lanchester observed that for ‘the generation of artists who did their work in the closeted pre-Wolfenden climate […] the fictional treatment of same-sex love had to be implicit, indirect, deflected, latent’. Britten and Tippett had to tread a line – or chose to – though they diverged regarding how far they strayed from it. Britten chose largely to remain on the cautious side in terms of public statements, but certainly managed to project the ‘implicit, indirect’ and so on through a series of works in the 1940s and 1950s, including Seven Sonnets along with Canticle I: My Beloved is Mine and the all-male opera Billy Budd. Tippett was in some ways bolder. As we shall see, the text and its musical setting in Songs for Achilles are unambiguously homoerotic. Even more explicit are the two gay characters in his opera The Knot Garden, premiered after 1967 but conceived in libretto form several years earlier. As Tippett’s biographer Oliver Soden has written, this libretto ‘was a means of putting together the fragments of a broken life […] swathed in secrecy’ (Michael Tippett, p. 496).

Despite these constraints, however, running like a thread – or a stream – through this album is a fluid sense of freedom, or at least the potential for it. Watery images abound, as they frequently did in gay works of art: and with them the promise of liberation, of nakedness or near-nakedness in the water. The artist Duncan Grant often painted swimming or bathing male nudes, swimming in rivers or seas being an acceptable means of being with other barely clothed men in public. The Swimming-Pool Library features two significant swimming pools: one the remnants of a Roman baths, concealed under a London townhouse; the other a venue for cruising in the 1980s. Britten was well known for his daily plunges into the North Sea, or into his icy-cold outdoor swimming pool at The Red

House. And Rupert Brooke was a passionate, positively evangelical swimmer, who swam in seas and rivers across the world, and ‘used to bathe, often like Byron at night, by the light of a bicycle lamp propped up in the grass on the edge of the river. It was here he swam naked with Virginia Woolf …’ (Charles Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur). In the translated Sonnets the water often takes the form of tears (‘Rivers and fountains, kindly give my tears back’; ‘How strange the weeds we water with our weeping’). In Swan it is the material and territory of the central protagonist (‘the lake is calm / the wavelets lap like rustling wings’; ‘my first time in water / I was unnaturally good’). Andrew McMillan wrote the poems which Thomas sets here after seeing a production of Matthew Bourne’s (largely) all-male Swan Lake. And there is something swan-like about the situation of the pre-1967 artist: not just latent and indirect, but maintaining, by necessity, a swan-like composure on the surface, concealing the more complex life underneath.

The Seven Sonnets may be love songs, but they have fire at their centre. The keys are mostly on the sharp side (the first number starts in a brisk A major), giving the work as a whole a sparkling energy. It is the first work Britten wrote for Pears, but the fourth group of songs he composed overall, and feels more of a true cycle than, say, On This Island from only three years before. As a whole, it embraces a full range of experience: philosophical musings on the nature of love and art (love as art, or vice versa) are followed by the agonies of love (‘Ah! why am I condemned to vent my passion / In bitter tears and fervent lamentation?’), leading to one of Britten’s most exquisite musical utterances, ‘Sonetto XXX’, with its serene arpeggios in voice and piano conjuring up wave after wave of ecstatic tenderness. The B flat tonality of the next song is disrupted by an uncertain, faltering sharpened fourth, while a hammering ostinato in the fifth speaks to the singer’s painful loss of love. The most turbulent song is the penultimate one, in a crashing C sharp minor, resolving finally onto a blissful D major in the finale, as if we have been waiting for it all along. (D was, in the early 1940s, Britten’s favourite key: that of Sinfonia da Requiem, the Violin Concerto, and his String Quartet No 1.) The piano is in majestic form here, ceremonial octaves rising towards a high chord of D. It is very like, in style and content, the opening of Ravel’s ‘Le Paon’ (from Histoires naturelles), featuring the absurd peacock who is perpetually jilted by his ‘fiancée’ – but here given a sincere romanticism, especially when the voice joins with the piano in a series of melting chords.

The Brooke poems set by Gipps in Four Songs of Youth, and the first three especially, depict a troubled, restless soul and hints of a secret torment. It is more than likely that

Gipps was unaware of Brooke’s bisexuality when she made these settings in 1940 (the same year as Britten’s Sonnets). In years to come, she was to be somewhat waspish about gay composers, writing to fellow composer Doreen Carwithen:

I have been told that Britten was personally responsible for having the careers of possible rivals ruined if he could; those who suffered from his jealousy (all of course normal married men) included Walton, Finzi, Howells, Berkeley and a number of other genuine composers.

The remarks may have arisen more from frustration at her own lack of performing opportunities than simple bigotry, but they make unpleasant reading today. Nonetheless, her settings of Brooke – of which this is the first commercial recording – are powerful and fascinating to hear. They are, in some ways, a surprise in terms of their harmonic language. Gipps is best known for her lushly scored symphonies, and her highly individual but decidedly Romantic harmonic palette. These songs are spikier and perhaps deliberately disconcerting, frequently opening in a familiarly ‘English’ mode, reminiscent of Ireland or Gurney, before leaning flat-wise or sharp-wise into more uncomfortable territory. This is particularly so in the first two songs, ‘Failure’ and ‘Unfortunate’, and it suits their sometimes agonised texts. ‘Peace 1914’ is the most tender, with a Debussyish piano part underpinning the wistful vocal line. It sets the first of Brooke’s

‘War Sonnets’ (the fifth of which begins with his most famous line: ‘If I should die, think only this of me’).

Throughout Four Songs of Youth, the vocal tessitura is wide and dramatic, spanning nearly two octaves (from a low B to a top A). Gipps favours virtuosic upward leaps, often straddling octaves, giving the songs a declamatory nature, especially in ‘The Dance’, which also has a fiendish piano part. Elgan Llŷr Thomas wonders whether they were written for a particular, and distinctive, tenor voice – one with an unusually low extension – but there is no evidence to suggest who that might be. The first known performance was a BBC Midlands broadcast in February 1951, where the songs were hidden amidst an item titled ‘Music of Midland composers’ (the tenor was the Midlands-based Ronald Bristol) and not even mentioned by name.

W. Denis Browne, the composer of To Gratiana dancing and singing, was present at the moment of Brooke’s death from septicaemia en route to Gallipoli in April 1915:

At 4:46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.

Browne buried the poet on Skyros, close to Brooke’s beloved sea, a few days later. He is generally better known for his association with Brooke than for his own compositions, but recent championing by Kate Kennedy and by Philip Lancaster (who transcribed To Gratiana) has brought him into the limelight, and this is a gloriously full-blooded and beautifully structured song, considerably more extrovert than others from the same era. Browne himself died only six weeks after Brooke, at Gallipoli; many of his music manuscripts were subsequently destroyed – following Browne’s wishes – by his executor, Edward Dent.

During the composition of his second opera, King Priam, Tippett extracted one of Achilles’ songs from Act 2 (‘Oh rich-soiled land’, retitling it ‘In the Tent’) and added two more to make a small set for voice and guitar. These Songs for Achilles were premiered by Peter Pears and Julian Bream – one of few guitarists at the time equipped to tackle the score’s intricacies – at Glemham House in Suffolk. Tippett had dearly wanted Pears to play Achilles in the opera’s premiere. He had been unavailable (mainly due to the first performance, around the same time, of Britten’s War Requiem), but the vocal line seems tailor-made for his particular talents – from the extravagant yet precise melisma, requiring phenomenal breath control, to the exquisitely floated high B flat at the end of the third song. Sadly, Pears did not keep the songs in his repertoire, nor record them, perhaps nervous of the wilder, warrior-like cries of ‘Across the Plain’, or of the homoerotic texts.