Anyone with an ear for Thomas Hardy’s poetry will respond to the sinewy variety of The Past & I – settings, composed or arranged by Arthur Keegan (b 1986), and outstandingly performed by Lotte Betts-Dean (mezzo-soprano), James Girling (guitar) and the Ligeti Quartet. The album opens with Keegan’s Elegies for Emma, six songs that explore the sad complexity of Hardy’s feelings for his dead first wife. Derek Holman’s Midnight on the Great Western, for voice and string quartet, with a gently lurching rhythm and splashes of dissonance, is the first of three “train” poems included here. Faintheart in a Railway Train is a brief, poised song by Muriel Herbert (1897-1984).
In Benjamin Britten’s At the Railway Station, Upway – from the composer’s song cycle Winter Words – a boy plays his violin on a crowded platform. Here, the transfer to guitar (from the piano original) is especially sensuous. Betts-Dean, who has an acute response to the texts, is equally at home in the pastoral wistfulness of Gerald Finzi and Imogen Holst as in the quirky originality of Kerry Andrew (b 1978). Her The Echo Elf Answers was commissioned for this project. The recital ends with Keegan’s String Quartet No 1, Elegies for Tom, an atmospheric response to the opening songs for Emma and a fitting end.