The 2016 release of this album commemorated George Butterworth's death in the Battle of the Somme one hundred years earlier. He was one of the million young men to die there, and heavy indeed is the irony of his setting of A.E. Housman's The lads in their hundreds. That song cycle, as well as the Suite for String Quartette, are orchestrated here by the present conductor, Kriss Russman, the idea apparently being to enlarge the rather slender corpus of orchestral music by Butterworth. But it's hard to argue that either work ...
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The 2016 release of this album commemorated George Butterworth's death in the Battle of the Somme one hundred years earlier. He was one of the million young men to die there, and heavy indeed is the irony of his setting of A.E. Housman's The lads in their hundreds. That song cycle, as well as the Suite for String Quartette, are orchestrated here by the present conductor, Kriss Russman, the idea apparently being to enlarge the rather slender corpus of orchestral music by Butterworth. But it's hard to argue that either work is added to by being orchestrated. The Six Songs from 'A Shropshire Lad' tend to emphasize a certain over-literal quality in Butterworth's settings. There is also a completion by Russman of an Orchestral Fantasia left unfinished by Butterworth and seemingly pointing in new directions. The chief attraction here is the group of short orchestral pieces -- an idyll, The Banks of Green Willow; the Two English Idylls; and the rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad -- entrancing mini tone poems that do...
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Add this copy of George Butterworth: Orchestral Works to cart. $21.80, new condition, Sold by Importcds rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Sunrise, FL, UNITED STATES, published 2016 by BIS.
