Jeffreys, J.: Northumberland and Beyond

Ian Partridge

Released on 11-11-2008 by Diversions
Main artists: Ian Partridge
Genre: Klassiek

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Language available : english

The career of British composer John Jeffreys is unusually interesting. A World War II veteran of the RAF, he studied music at Trinity College of Music in London after the war. Although he composed music in all genres, he was strongly oriented toward the art song. Parallel to his own composing, he pursued strong interests in Renaissance music, becoming an authority on the lutenist/composer Philip Rosseter and in English and Scots poetry. As a child he had been exposed to the music and literature of the English Renaissance, but never to the Viennese classics, a fact that profoundly shaped his style. During the period of maximal modernist repression of other styles, he became discouraged and destroyed in most of his music. But in his old age (he still lives in West Suffolk, where, one learns from the booklet, "his hobbies include hardy plants"), he rediscovered tapes from the 1960s of his music being performed and was encouraged to reconstruct it. A modest renaissance has ensued, and any lover of English song should make it his or her business to check it out. This release by well-known tenor Ian Partridge with his sister Jennifer Partridge as accompanist, recorded in the early '90s, makes an ideal starting place. The landscape on the cover gives the potential buyer the wrong idea. Jeffreys, though certainly a stylistic conservative, is not really neo-anything. He does set pastoral poetry like Thomas Nabbes' "The Little Milkmaid" (track 23), but he does not really belong with the English pastoral school. His use of modal harmony, very delicately balanced with tonal moves, is instructive in this respect; he draws deeply on English traditions but is not using modal sounds simply to evoke the past, and there's nothing really nostalgic about any of these songs. All are quiet, and transmitted in the booklet is the composer's beautiful comment that "music on the edge of silence is the most telling of all." He tends to break up strophic structures with small melodic divergences and elaborations, not to let them set into fixed patterns. Jeffreys does not restrict himself to early texts; perhaps half the songs set texts from the early twentieth century, with a large group at the beginning of the program from the pen of Wilfred Wilson Gibson including the devastating antiwar stanza Stow on the Wold (track 5). Sample also Jeffreys' setting of A.E. Housman's 'Tis time, I think, by Wenlock Town (track 11). It is perhaps in Jeffreys that Housman finds his perfect musical exponent, and you might think of Housman, who used the English countryside as settings for his jewel-like poems but was in no way a "pastoral" poet, as Jeffreys' literary soulmate. Essential for singers, and most strongly recommended for everybody else as a major find from the years lost to the modernist totalitarianism.
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Jeffreys, J.: Northumberland and Beyond

Jennifer Partridge

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Northumberland (John Jeffreys)

Northumberland

Ian Partridge