English pastoral scene Photo: Robin Webster CC by 2.0
The English composer George Butterworth went to Eton and Oxford and enlisted soon after the outbreak of war. Butterworth didn’t write a great deal of music, and destroyed many of his works in case he didn’t return and have the chance to revise them. Among the works that survived, his settings of A E Houseman’s poems from A Shropshire Lad are among the most popular.
The poems were not about the Great War – they were written about twenty years earlier. But their themes of loss and the early deaths of young men resonated perfectly with the grief caused by the war.
Butterworth was one of many composers who were inspired by the melancholy nostalgia for a more rural England, and in 1911 and 1912 he set eleven of the sixty-three poems. This Rhapsody is a kind of orchestral summary or postlude, quoting from two of the songs: Loveliest of Trees and With Rue my Heart is Laden.
George Butterworth died in the Battle of the Somme, shot by a sniper in August 1916.
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich.
Recorded 21 April 2016, Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington by RNZ Concert.
Producer: David McCaw
Engineer: Graham Kennedy
