Rememberance

It's November 11th, Armistice day and Rememberance Sunday combined this year. So it is fitting to play this BBC Music mag cover disk titled The Pity Of War, Songs and Poems of Wartime Suffering. A superb project of songs setting the works of several of the English war poets from WW1 but also honouring the dead of other countries and other conflicts with songs from French and German composers as well as Charles Ives. WW1 perhaps has the richest heritage in this field but works on the disk also come from WW2, The Napoleonic Wars, the Boer War and the American Civil War. Another feature of the disk is that there are occasional interruptions for readings of other poems and prose pieces by the actor Simon Russell Beale. The project was put together by pianist Ianin Burnside who handles most of the accompanist duties together with Roger Vignoles. The singing cast could hardly be more distinguished in the current British scene with soprano Sally Matthews, tenor Mark Padmore and baritone Christopher Maltman. The song settings are by Arthur Somervell, Kurt Weill, James Macmillan, Gustav Mahler, Charles Ives, Francis Poulenc, John Ireland, Hans Eisler, Michael Tippett, Gerald Finzi, Reynaldo Hahn, Benjamin Britten, Ivor Gurney and George Butterworth, while the readings come from works by Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. Everyone concerned with the project gives of their best. Originally geatured in the Radio 3 series Voices, that programme is now much missed.