THIS SCEPTERED ISLE: BRITISH SONG

Andante con moto – Allegro vivace – Andante con moto

Bridge had already been successful in Walter Wilson Cobbett’s competition to write a ‘Phantasy’ – Cobbett’s reinvention of the Elizabeth Fantasy as new single-movement chamber works – and in 1910 he (along with Vaughan Williams and others) was commissioned by Cobbett to compose a Phantasy Piano Quartet. It’s a work in a satisfying arch form based on free-flowing musical ideas all of which derive from the powerful opening gesture. Bridge’s most famous pupil, Benjamin Britten, wrote in a programme note for the Aldeburgh Festival about this piece. He described the music as ‘Sonorous yet lucid, with clear, clean lines, grateful to listen to and to play. It is the music of a practical musician, brought up in German orthodoxy, but who loved French romanticism and conception of sound—Brahms happily tempered with Fauré.’

Nigel Simeone 2013

She Loves and She Confesses Too
O Solitude
Mad Bess 

Benjamin Britten was a great admirer of his fellow British composer Henry Purcell and created ‘realizations’ of Purcell’s songs for voice and piano. These are not just accompaniments, but rather a re-imagining of the baroque continuo part, adding modern harmonic sensibilities while respecting the original vocal line. 

Britten’s setting of She Loves and She Confesses Too is a notable example of his efforts to realize and revive the music of the 17th-century composer. The song sets a poem by Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), and describes the direct, almost military, triumph of love after a lady finally confesses her affection. 

O solitude is set using a ‘ground bass’, a short theme in the bass line that constantly repeats – in this case 28 times. The Purcell original is thought to date from the mid-1680s, and sets a translation of Antoine Girard de Saint’s La solitude. Britten paints its words through plaintive falling intervals, meandering passages and a wonderful use of the lowest register of the voice for ‘as only death can cure’. 

One of Purcell’s ‘mad-songs’, Mad Bess was published in 1683. In Britten’s hands, it becomes a complex piece that has a deliberate craziness with many different sections and constant twists and turns in a short space of time. The singer and piano parts are often independent of each other, and Britten uses the opportunity to bring the words, such as ‘flaming eyes’, to life. 

Sidney Keyes died in Tunisia in April 1943 at the age of 20. Although usually spoken of as a war poet, none of the poems he is believed to have written during his short period of active service survive. However, of the poems I have chosen to set, all but one (The Island City) were written after he had enlisted in April 1942. Their mood is darker than his earlier work, but it is significant that his major ‘war’ poem The Foreign Gate was written while he was still at Oxford in February 1942. He is probably best known for Tippett’s 1950 settings of The Heart’s Assurance and Remember Your Lovers, but his Collected Poems (a volume of little more than 100 pages) reveal a remarkably sophisticated perspective, heavily influenced by Rilke and Yeats but demonstrating an exceptional, individual voice, brutally cut short. Victoria Sackville-West wrote of ‘the astonishing maturity of his mind, the intense seriousness of his outlook, and his innate pre-occupation with major things’. 

Colin Matthews 2026 © 

1. The Island City

Walking among this island
People inhabiting this island city,
Whose coast recedes, whose facile sand
Bears cold cathedrals, restively:
I see a black time coming, history
Tending in footnotes our forgotten land. 

Hearing the once virginal
But ageing choirs of intellect
Sing a psalm that would appal
Our certain fathers, I expect
No gentle decadence, no right effect
Of falling, but itself the barren fall:
And Yeats’ gold song-bird shouting over all. 

2. From: North Sea

The evening thickens.
Figures, figures like a frieze
Cross the sea’s face, their cold heads
Disdainful of the wind that pulls their hair
The brown light lies across the harbour wall. 

3. Night Estuary

And yet the spiked moon menacing
The great humped dykes, scaring the plaintive seafowl,
Makes no right image, wakes no assertive echo.
Though one may stride the dykes with face upturned
To the yellow inflammation in the sky
And nostrils full of the living samphire scent,
There is no kindness in man’s heart for these.
In this place and at this unmeaning hour,
There is no hope for a man’s hope or his sorrow. 

O you lionhearted poet’s griefs, or griefs
Wild as the curlew’s cry of passage;
O hope uneasy as the rising ebb
Among the sedges, cold and questing guest;
Leave me alone this hour with the restive night.
Allow me to accept the witless landscape. 

4. Interlude

5. Seascape

Our country was a country drowned long since,
By shark-toothed currents drowned:
And in that country walk the generations,
The dancing generations with grey eyes 
Whose touch would be like rain, the generations
Who never thought to justify their beauty.
There once the flowering cherry grasped the wall
With childish fingers, once the gull swung crying 
Across the morning or the evening mist;
Once high heels rattled on the terrace
Over the water’s talk, and the wind lifted
The hard leaves of the bay; the white sand drifted
Under the worm-bored rampart, under the white eyelid. 

Our country was a country washed with colour.
Its light was good to us, sharp limning
The lover’s secret smile, the fine-drawn fingers;
It drew long stripes between the pointed jaws
Of sea-bleached wreckage grinning through the wrack
And turned cornelian the flashing eyeball.
For here the tide sang like a riding hero
Across the rock-waste, and the early sun 
Was shattered in the teeth of shuttered windows. 

But now we are the gowned lamenters
Who stand among the junipers and ruins.
We are the lovers who defied the sea. 

Text from Sidney Keyes: Collected Poems (1945) 

Whitman Settings (1991) 

Although these versions of characteristically powerful but unusually short poems by Walt Whitman constituted my eighth concert work for a soprano voice, they were my first in many years for voice and piano. Earlier attempts having been impossibly dependent on models rather too close to home, I was very conscious, while composing, of trying to re-imagine a very familiar genre with fresh ears – specifically of setting the voice in different contexts within the all-encompassing range of the piano. All four poems muse on things in space or the sky, and all four songs grow from the short idea heard at the outset. Whitman Settings was commissioned by the Amphion Foundation and is dedicated to Lucy Shelton, who gave the first performances at the 1991 Aldeburgh Festival (with Ian Brown) and at BBC Pebble Mill (with John Constable). In 1992 I made a parallel version for soprano and orchestra. 

© Oliver Knussen 

1. Allegramente

2. Allegro scherzando

3. Andante tranquillo

4. Allegro molto

Walton started work on his Piano Quartet in 1918 – when he was sixteen years old – and he finished it in 1921. Herbert Howells’s work for the same forces was an influence and its success encouraged him to try his own hand at one. In 1924, it was published in the Carnegie Collection of British Music (as Howells’s Piano Quartet had been), though not before getting lost in the post for a couple of years. It’s a brilliant display of a young composer’s gifts, with a haunting slow movement and a ruggedly exciting finale.

Nigel Simeone 2013