Silent Noon ~ Terfel
Featuring both renowned and lesser-known English composers who flourished between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, this collection is indispensable for lovers of great songs and great singing. It comprises 33 songs of great variety: Elizabethan plaints of love and death, Roger Quilter's famous settings of Shakespeare, Tennyson and Waller; the lovely title song and "Linden Lea" by Vaughan Williams; and A. E. Housman's moving lament for young lives lost, "A Shropshire Lad," in Arthur Somervell's beautiful setting. Surprisingly, the two most venerable composers, Hubert Parry and Charles Stanford, are represented respectively by a parody on love and two Edward Lear nonsense songs. There are Benjamin Britten's charming folksong arrangements, settings of John Masefield's roistering sea shanties by Frederick Keel and Peter Warlock, and two settings of Yeats' magical "The Cloths of Heaven," one by Thomas Dunhill, the other by the Welsh composer Dilys Elwyn-Edwards, the only woman included on the record. Michael Head creates his own contrast with a swaggering song about money and a setting of the Lord's Prayer. The music throughout is utterly enchanting. Its melodic and harmonic contours and pastoral atmosphere make it unmistakably, though indefinably, "English."  The performance is beyond praise. With Martineau as matchless collaborator, Terfel can color and adapt his glorious voice to fit every mood, character, and expression, from dreamy, yearning tenderness to decisive vigor. He ranges from full sonority to a delicate, floating mezza voce; there is mournful nostalgia and drunken defiance, as well as passionate ardor and humorous, sarcastic rapid-fire patter-songs. Terfel's diction is so clear that one hardly needs the texts.--Edith Eisler