Roderick Williams & Iain Burnside

Baritone Roderick Williams and pianist-presenter Iain Burnside are not working together for the first time. They have previously appeared together at the Wigmore Hall and on BBC Radio 3, where they appeared together on Burnside's show 'Iain Burnside's Voices programme'. In their song program, the lyrics of Thomas Hardy and William Blake are brotherly side by side. Although both are very British, it is hard to imagine a greater literary difference than that between Hardy and Blake. Hardy is the nineteenth century man who started as a writer of pastoral poems and later evolved towards positivism. Blake is known as an eighteenth-century genius and feverish visionary, who, like painter/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, belonged to the Pre-Raphaelites.

Benjamin Britten > is perhaps the most gifted and original voice in England since his baroque colleague Purcell. Williams sings his beautiful cycle 'Songs and proverbs of William Blake'. Vaughan-Williams is a famous exponent of British late Romanticism. For many, however, it will be a telling introduction to the early twentieth-century conservationist Gerald Finzi - who had Vaughan-Williams as a mentor - and his collection 'I said to love'. Signs for even more settings by Hardy: the British impressionist John Ireland, a typical miniaturist who was never interested in large forms, Judith Weir, the only woman in the company and the excellent chambrist Hugh Wood.