James Geer

James Geer & Ronald Woodley – Maconchy & Vaughan Williams: Songs, Volume 1 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · May 27, 2023 · Comments off

The first of two releases to mark the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth presents two of his major song collections, while bringing to light a substantial number of songs by the composer’s student Elizabeth Maconchy. Her works here are almost all unpublished and virtually unknown since their original first performances from manuscript, and span several decades of the composer’s career from the time of her studies with Vaughan Williams in the mid-1920s though to her committed espousal of the British modernist aesthetic by the 1960s and 70s.

The songs are performed by tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley in this continuation of their long-standing partnership.

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James Geer & Ronald Woodley – Maconchy & Vaughan Williams: Songs, Volume 2 (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · May 20, 2023 · Comments off

This second of two releases to mark the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth presents a further two major song collections by the composer, while bringing to light another selection of songs by his student Elizabeth Maconchy. Her works here are almost all unpublished and virtually unknown since their first performances from manuscript, and span several decades of the composer’s career from the time of her studies with Vaughan Williams in the mid-1920s through to her committed espousal of the British modernist aesthetic by the 1960s and 70s.

The songs are performed by tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley in this continuation of their long-standing partnership.

(more…)

James Geer, Andrew West, Ronald Woodley – Façades (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 9, 2023 · Comments off

James Geer, Andrew West, Ronald Woodley - Façades (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

SOMM Recordings explores one of the most significant partnerships in 20th-century British music with Facades, an album of piano-accompanied songs and music for four-hand piano by William Walton and Constant Lambert. Facades takes its title from Walton’s era-defining “entertainment”, heard here in arrangements for four-hand piano of its two orchestral Suites by Lambert – regarded by Walton as the definitive reciter of Edith Sitwell’s nonsense verses. Lambert’s Trois pi`eces n`egres pour les touches blanches for piano duet are a kaleidoscopic, jazz-accented tour de force exploration of the piano’s white keys. Described by the composer as an “idyll”, Walton’s Siesta (also for two-player piano) is, says Ronald Woodley in his entertaining and informative booklet notes, “infused with the clear light and open charm of Italy”.

The eight song settings by Lambert of poems by the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po are “exquisitely crafted, restrained and often enigmatic miniatures [marked by an] elusive and allusive musical style”. Completing the recital, a selection of songs by Walton range from Tudor pastiche (Under the Greenwood Tree) to the atonal-inflected Tritons and lyrically captivating Beatriz’s Song. Making their SOMM debuts are tenor James Geer and his accompanist in the songs, pianist Ronald Woodley. The latter is joined at the keyboard in the four-hand piano arrangements by Andrew West whose previous SOMM recordings include three acclaimed volumes of Parry’s English Lyrics.
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James Geer, Ronald Woodley – Dreams Melting (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 9, 2023 · Comments off

James Geer, Ronald Woodley - Dreams Melting (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

At the recital’s heart are two substantial cycles. Setting seven poems by Thomas Hardy, Gerald Finzi’s Till Earth Outwears provides an intimate and movingly melancholic commentary in what Ronald Woodley describes in his extensive and informative booklet notes as a “male perspective on life, love and loss”. Rarely recorded, Howard Ferguson’s five-part treatment of Denton Welch’s poems, Discovery, typifies “the subtlety of the relationship between late romanticism, modernism and the inherited idioms of ‘Britishness’ that composers of Ferguson’s generation inevitably grew up with”. Its second song, Dreams Melting, provides the recital’s title.
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