Elizabeth Maconchy, William Walton

condition (record/cover): NM / EX
Insert included.

Two British composers of very different formation and temperament, brought together on an L'Oiseau-Lyre LP that documents some of their most direct and immediate vocal writing. Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) had studied with Vaughan Williams and subsequently in Prague, and had developed a compositional language of taut, dissonant counterpoint - more related to Bartók than to any English predecessor - that distinguished her sharply from the pastoral mainstream. Her vocal works bring this language into contact with lyric poetry in a way that intensifies rather than sweetens the encounter.

William Walton's A Song For The Lord Mayor's Table (1962) - a cycle of six songs for soprano and piano setting texts from various periods of English literature - is among the wittiest and most accomplished of his later works, a piece in which his gift for vocal line and his ear for the relationship between word and music are deployed with characteristic elegance and occasional wickedness. The pairing of these two composers - both of whom worked somewhat outside the dominant streams of their respective critical moments - makes this an illuminating document of the range of British vocal music in the post-war decades. L'Oiseau-Lyre, SOL 331.