We are delighted that SOMM Records has just released Roderick Williams – Baritone and Susie Allan’s stunning recording of Sarah Cattley’s song-cycle A Square and Candle-lighted Boat – “a touching, quietly intense creation” (Gramophone) and “…very good and well-imagined songs” (Music Web International).

Reviews

“…a 2022 commission from the Vaughan Williams Foundation and Music at Paxton and Thaxted Festivals to poems by Frances Cornford (herself a cousin of RVW) … proves a touching, quietly intense creation, conceived by Cattley as a ‘creative antithesis’ and ‘companion piece’ to RVW’s Songs of Travel, its ‘probing of emotions from a woman’s point of view with a love of home contrasting with the masculine perspective of Robert Louis Stevenson’s wanderer.” Gramophone

“The new song cycle by Sarah Cattley takes a set of five poems by Frances Cornford, A Square and Candle-lighted Boat. It was written for the Music at Paxton and Thaxted Festivals, performed by Williams and Susie Allan. Cornford was a cousin of Vaughan Williams and Cattley’s setting is an astute piece of work, drawing sufficient attention in her piano writing to the ‘far off gulls’ and the ‘clock ticking’ without too undue an emphasis. In the poem that lends its title to the cycle, Cattley is attentive to dappled allusions and colouristic treble lines and indeed to the hooting owl. These domestic poems offer charm and limpidity. If the intention was to present what she calls a ‘creative antithesis’ to VW’s Songs of Travel, I think she’s succeeded.” Music Web International

“Sarah Cattley was commissioned, with support from the RVW Trust, to write a set of songs specifically for performance by Roderick Williams and Susie Allan. The result is a set of five songs entitled A Square and Candle-lighted Boat. Appropriately, the texts are poems by Frances Cornford (1886-1960), a contemporary and cousin of VW. Simon Heffer tells us that Cattley has said that she views the songs as a “creative antithesis” to Songs of Travel, in the sense that the chosen poems express the notion of staying at home rather than travelling. But she also views her composition as a “companion piece” to VW’s cycle. I like these songs very much. In all five settings, Cattley displays a fine feeling for the words and her songs are very atmospheric. The only criticism – a very mild one – that I would venture is that all of them are in a slow tempo; something a little quicker in pace would have provided useful contrast. That said, there’s plenty of contrast within the songs as they stand. The first one, ‘The Bedroom Dawn’ is magically still, especially during the first stanza. The second, ‘The Coast – Norfolk’, seems to me to present the calm of old age and solitude. The third song, ‘Bickers Cottage’ starts off portraying a cosy domestic scene but then is quite eerie at the end as the arrival of a ghost disturbs things. A line from the fourth poem, ‘The Country Bedroom’ supplies Cattley with the title for the collection. The poet imagines a bedroom as a boat at sea; at one point the singer has to imitate the call of an owl – Williams does so most realistically. Finally, there’s tranquillity in ‘Waking in the Attic Bedroom’. These are very good, well-imagined songs. I’m sure Sarah Cattley feels very fortunate that her songs were premiered and now are recorded for the first time by such perceptive and skilled interpreters as Williams and Allan.” Music Web International

SOMM: cover notes by Simon Heffer

“The disc ends with the first recordings of six contemporary songs. The song-cycle A Square and Candle-lighted Boat by Sarah Cattley (b.1995) was written specially for the Music at Paxton and Thaxted Festivals (with support from the RVW Trust), to be performed by Roderick Williams and Susie Allan. It is the setting of five poems by Frances Cornford, a contemporary of Vaughan Williams and indeed a cousin, being like him related to Charles Darwin; Cornford was his granddaughter and the composer his great-nephew.

Cornford also drew much inspiration from the East Anglian countryside, where Vaughan Williams collected a number of his folk-songs. Sarah Cattley lives near Cambridge, which was Cornford’s home, and was invited by Stainer and Bell to write a commemorative piece for the celebrations of Vaughan Williams’s 150th birthday in 2022. The work she created, O Western Wind…An Anniversary was the setting of a poem by Ursula Vaughan Williams.”