An English Wanderer

Baritone Christopher Maltman, supported by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Thierry Fischer, is the featured artist on this excellent BBC Music mag cover disk from 2004. Titled Vaughan Williams Songs Of Travel, it also features music by Ravel and Debussy. Songs Of Travel was conceived by Vaughan Williams as a kind of English Winterreise based on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. They are performed here in their orchestrated version, with some of the orchestrations being Vaughan Williams's own and the remainder being done by his assistant Roy Douglas after RVW's death. Sounding from more sturdy yeoman stock than Schubert's wanderer, the song cycle is still a moving one and Maltman is in excellent voice on this and all the works on the disk. The other substantial vocal work here is Le Livre de Baudelaire, an orchestration of four songs from Debussy's Cinq Poemes de Baudelaire completed by John Adams. Adams consciously orchestrates in the style of Debussy with that familiar languid and sensual feel and his additions do not sound at all out of place. The disk is topped and tailed by two pieces from Ravel. Maltman sings three brief settings of words by Paul Morand on the theme of Don Quichotte a Dulcinee and the disk ends with the BBCSO luxuriating in the orchestral showpiece Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, another subtle undermining of the waltz form without the savagery of La Valse.