Of Times and Seasons – Lea-Cox Songs by Rogers

There are English song composers who write for the voice as if they have spent decades listening to how it actually behaves in a room — where the breath wants to fall, where a vowel opens naturally into resonance — and there are those who write competent lines that a singer must bend herself around. Peter Lea-Cox belongs, happily, in the first category more often than not, and this new collection of his songs, capably though not always ravishingly performed by Lesley-Jane Rogers and Jennie-Helen Moston, makes as good a case for him as any single disc probably could.

Lea-Cox has spent his working life inside English cathedral and church music — as organist, as choir trainer, as the sort of artist who knows what a text sounds like read aloud in a stone building at 6:00pm in November. That grounding shows. His word-setting has none of the fussiness that afflicts lesser composers working this soil; he trusts English prosody to do much of the work for him, the way Finzi did, the way Ireland did before him.

The six Hopkins settings are the heart of the disc, and rightly so — Hopkins resists music the way certain granite resists a chisel, all those compacted stresses and sprung rhythms fighting against anything so regular as a bar line. Lea-Cox does not fight back. He lets the lines breathe unevenly, avoids the trap of strophic tidiness, and gives Rogers space to declaim rather than merely sing. There is a lineage here running straight back to Finzi’s Dies Natalis, and the comparison is not unflattering so much as inevitable — anyone setting this poet in this idiom in postwar England writes in that shadow whether he wants to or not. The syllabic writing is where Lea-Cox is most himself: plain, unornamented, trusting the word over the melisma.

Not everything lands. “Thee, God, I come from, to thee go” tips into hymnody so square, so foursquare-Anglican, that it edges uncomfortably close to Vaughan Williams’s “Linden Lea” — lovely music, but not quite the register Hopkins’s anguish requires. I wanted more risk there, more of the harmonic unease that colors “Winter Prelude,” the Eliot setting that opens the disc with a soft, unresolved dissonance hanging in the piano like breath on cold glass.

The Eight Seasonal Anthems, composed in 2005 for a Lutheran congregation in London, are a stranger, more uneven proposition — and I confess to some old-fashioned resistance here. A solo song, however well made, is not a choral anthem, and I remain unconvinced that Matins or Evensong benefits from the substitution; it is a small step from this toward guitars and amplification in the chancel, and my ears have had quite enough of that particular experiment over forty years of pew-sitting. That said — taken outside their liturgical function, heard simply as a cycle in recital, these eight pieces work rather winningly. They slide between an almost Lloyd Webber-ish sentimentality and something closer to Holst’s folksong manner, then pull back toward genuine gravity before the sweetness can cloy. Rogers sings them with more affection than critical distance, which is probably the right choice.

Katherine Foyle’s “Let the Season Lift Your Spirit” is pure catchy charm, nothing more claimed for it and nothing more needed. There’s also a brief piano interlude, gently atonal, that nods — quite openly — toward Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie; Moston plays it with real sensitivity to its bell-tone sonorities, and I hope Lea-Cox has more piano music tucked in a drawer somewhere, because this fragment suggests an imagination that could use more room to work without a text steering it.

Rogers’s soprano is bright rather than opulent, sometimes thin at the very top, but she has diction to die for — every consonant of Hopkins’s tangled syntax arrives intact — and Moston’s accompaniments are alert without ever grandstanding. The recorded sound is close, dry, a little unforgiving in climaxes, but it serves this repertoire’s intimacy well enough.

The liner notes, alas, tell us almost nothing — no dates of composition, no analytical guidance, nothing about the genesis of the Hopkins cycle, which deserved better. Still: this is a rewarding, occasionally moving disc from a composer who understands the English art-song tradition from the inside, even when he doesn’t quite escape its more comfortable habits. Worth hearing, worth returning to, if not quite a front-rank contender against the Finzi and Ireland recordings it inevitably invites comparison with.