Benjamin Hewat-Craw, Yuhao Guo - Never Such Innocence: English Song (2022)

Tracklist

01. The House of Life: No. 1, Love-Sight
02. The House of Life: No. 2, Silent Noon
03. The House of Life: No. 3, Love's Minstrels
04. The House of Life: No. 4, Heart's Haven
05. The House of Life: No. 5, Death in Love
06. The House of Life: No. 6, Love's Last Gift
07. 6 Songs from a Shropshire Lad: No. 1, Loveliest of Trees
08. 6 Songs from a Shropshire Lad: No. 2, When I Was One-and-Twenty
09. 6 Songs from a Shropshire Lad: No. 3, Look Not in My Eyes
10. 6 Songs from a Shropshire Lad: No. 4, Think No. More, Lad
11. 6 Songs from a Shropshire Lad: No. 5, The Lads in Their Hundreds
12. 6 Songs from a Shropshire Lad: No. 6, Is My Team Ploughing?
13. 5 Elizabethan Songs: No. 1, Orpheus with His Lute
14. 5 Elizabethan Songs: No. 2, Tears
15. 5 Elizabethan Songs: No. 3, Under the Greenwood Tree
16. 5 Elizabethan Songs: No. 4, Sleep
17. 5 Elizabethan Songs: No. 5, Spring

All three composers of this recording experienced the horrors of World War I, the deaths of friends and colleagues. The regret over a lost innocence is reflected in their songs.

Baritone Benjamin Hewat-Craw and pianist Yuhao Guo have taken the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams' birth as an opportunity to present songs by British composers between the years 1904 and 1914. Both Ralph Vaughan Williams and lesser-known composers George Butterworth and Ivor Bertie Gurney fought in the First World War. More relevant today than ever, the recording links three different composers' biographies, which for two of them came to an abrupt end with the onset of the Great War. Butterworth was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Gurney suffered from shell shock after his military service and spent the last 15 years of his life in a psychiatric ward. He died in 1937, 85 years ago.

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