A poet and composer, Ivor Gurney was a victim of the First World War, during which he was wounded and suffered shellshock, interrupting his time at the Royal College of Music in London, to which he returned in 1918 to study with Vaughan Williams. Suffering from depression, he entered a mental institution in 1922, remaining there and in similar hospitals until his death in 1937.
Gurney is chiefly remembered as the composer of songs – settings of Housman, Edward Thomas and others – totalling around three hundred, set against his surviving poems, which numbered some nine hundred. This is Vol. 24 in the Naxos English Songs series, and the second to feature works by Gurney.
Ivor GURNEY (1890–1937)
The English Song Series, Vol. 24
Songs, Vol. 2
Sleep • Severn Meadows • Snow
Marcus Farnsworth, BaritoneEric McElroy, Piano
Ivor Gurney was a poet as well as a composer and was accomplished in a number of musical genres including song. With his intuitive approach to poetry he selected texts widely, from contemporaries to ballads, Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, and even set his own lyrics. This wide-ranging selection includes his masterpieces – among them Sleep and Severn Meadows – with several songs heard in their first recording. Marcus Farnsworth, First Prize winner in the 2009 Wigmore Hall International Song Competition, has been praised for his ‘superbly controlled baritone voice’ (Fanfare).
Baritone Marcus Farnsworth is a First Prize winner of the Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation International Song Competition. He appears regularly with English National Opera, and has performed at Garsington Opera and the Three Choirs Festival, as well as with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. He has undertaken European tours of Purcell’s King Arthur with the Gabrieli Consort and Vox Luminis, while other highlights include Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra, and Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King at the BBC Proms.
Pianist Eric McElroy has appeared in recital across North America and Europe. Also a prolific composer, his works have been performed in Germany, Austria, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2014 he moved to Vienna where he obtained his Master’s degree in piano, and in 2017 he completed his postgraduate diploma at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire under Mark Bebbington and Margaret Fingerhut. He graduated with a doctorate in musicology under the supervision of Daniel Grimley in 2023 at the University of Oxford and is now based in London.
Canticles I–V
The Heart of the Matter
Langridge • Bedford
Rigby • Ragin • Finley • Dench
– MusicWeb International
All You Who Sleep Tonight: Song Cycles
Booth • Bardon • Spence • Matthews-Owen
– BBC Music Magazine ★★★★
Earth and Air and Rain
By Footpath and Stile • To a Poet
Williams
Burnside • Sacconi Quartet
– MusicWeb International
Vedic Hymns • Four Songs for Voice and Violin
Humbert Wolfe Songs
Gritton • Langridge • Maltman • Fuller • Bedford
– BBC Music Magazine