**Housman’s Shropshire: A Complete Pilgrimage**
**A Shropshire Lad: The complete cycle in poem and song settings. / Anthony Rolfe Johnson, tenor; Graham Johnson, piano; Alan Bates, reader. / Hyperion Dyad CDD22044. 2 CDs, 123 minutes.**
This is the sort of thing Hyperion does better than anyone—and I say that knowing full well how that sounds, like special pleading for a label that’s earned more than its share of critical affection. But here’s a project that couldn’t have originated anywhere else: all sixty-three poems from Housman’s 1896 collection, arranged in published order, with twenty-six set to music by seven composers and the remainder spoken by Alan Bates. The conception has Graham Johnson’s fingerprints all over it, though I confess I don’t know whose idea it originally was.
What matters is the execution. And here we have something close to ideal—though not quite, and I’ll get to that.
Butterworth dominates, as he should. His complete A Shropshire Lad cycle plus three additional settings form the musical spine of the enterprise, and Rolfe Johnson sings them with that particular plangency in the upper register that makes one understand why this music endures. “Bredon Hill” unfolds with deceptive simplicity—those folk-inflected contours that sound inevitable until you try to imagine the poem set any other way. The economy of means masks deeper currents; Johnson (the pianist, that is) finds them without fuss, his left hand darkening the texture just enough when “they toll the one bell only” arrives.
Ireland’s seven songs—five from The Land of Lost Content—demand more. These are harmonically denser than Butterworth, less immediately ingratiating, and Andrew Green’s phrase about their “nut brown richness” strikes me as exactly right. “The Encounter” in particular refuses easy sentiment; Ireland hears something harder in Housman than most composers do. Rolfe Johnson responds with less vibrato, a more interior sound that serves the music’s reticence.
The Orr settings surprised me. Six songs from a composer who wrote only thirty-five in his entire career, and while I’m not prepared to endorse Christopher Palmer’s claim that Orr ranks among the finest British song composers of the century, “Into my heart an air that kills” and “The Isle of Portland” have genuine substance. The vocal line in the former moves with affecting simplicity over a piano part that does more than merely accompany—it comments, qualifies, deepens. Johnson plays it with the kind of attention that makes you hear more than you knew was there.
But here’s where my reservations surface. The two Berkeley songs aren’t from A Shropshire Lad at all—they’re Housman settings, yes, but from the early 1940s, and Green’s explanation for their inclusion (something about Berkeley’s relationship with Britten) doesn’t quite convince. The focus blurs. Similarly, Mervyn Horder’s “White in the moon” strikes me as competent but unremarkable, more dutiful than inspired.
Barber’s “With rue my heart is laden” reminds us what an eighteen-year-old genius sounds like. Written in 1928 as part of his op. 2, it compresses an astonishing amount of feeling into barely more than a minute. Rolfe Johnson gives it proper weight without over-selling—a fine judgment call.
And then there’s Bates, reading thirty-eight poems in that distinctive voice. He eschews declamation entirely, opts instead for intimacy and conversational directness. It works. You can almost see him in an armchair, the mental spotlight shifting between reader and performers as the cycle unfolds. His pacing is impeccable; he understands that Housman’s apparent simplicity conceals considerable craft, and he doesn’t push.
The recorded sound places everyone in believable space—close enough for detail, distant enough to breathe. The booklet essay by Green is exemplary, the kind of scholarship that illuminates without showing off.
Should you listen straight through? Probably not. This is a set to live with over time, to dip into and return to. The complete chronological presentation serves a documentary purpose, but it’s also slightly artificial—after all, Housman didn’t conceive the poems as a song cycle, and the alternation between sung and spoken texts, while carefully managed, can feel somewhat arbitrary.
Still, this represents a notable achievement. Rolfe Johnson’s voice suits this repertoire ideally—that easy fluency in the passaggio, the way he colors vowels without distorting them. Johnson’s piano playing provides the bedrock throughout, responsive and probing. And the enterprise itself, bringing together so much fine music (and some merely interesting music) in service of one poet’s vision, deserves celebration.
The reissue at midprice makes it nearly irresistible. Recommended without serious reservation to anyone who cares about English song.
