SOMM’s Ferrier Album of 20th-Century Song

courtesy of Naxos of America

The last album of remastered archival recordings of the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier, entitled Kathleen Ferrier in New York, was released by SOMM Recordings at the very beginning of 2020. Almost exactly a year later, SOMM released its latest Ferrier offering, 20th Century British Treasures. Once again, Amazon.com has decided to release the content only as an MP3 album. Last year there was considerable delay between the MP3 release and the appearance of a Web page for the physical recording. This year, given that SOMM is based in Surrey in England, delivery of the physical version is likely to take considerable time, due to continuing pandemic conditions.

The three tracks of songs by Roger Quilter were recorded in the Decca studios in London on December 10 and 11, 1951. All of the other recordings were either taken from BBC broadcasts or BBC recital performances. The composers represented on these tracks are (in order of appearance) Hubert Parry, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Villiers Stanford, Frank Bridge, Peter Warlock, Maurice Jacobson, Edmund Rubbra, William Wordsworth, Howard Ferguson, Benjamin Britten, and Lennox Berkeley. Like the Decca tracks, almost all of these selections were included among the fourteen CDs in the Decca Centenary Edition box, which was released in January of 2012. Nevertheless, the final selection on the 20th Century British Treasures CD, Berkeley’s Opus 27 setting for contralto and orchestra of four poems (translated into English) by Teresa of Ávila, has been publicly released for the first time.

Those (like myself) with an obsessive desire to account for “all things Ferrier” will therefore value this new release only for the concluding Berkeley selection, given that we already spend a fair amount of time listening to the Decca anthology. However, in that richer context, many of us may have observed that music, which may have been “treasured” during the twentieth century (perhaps due to Ferrier’s interpretations), has lost much of its impact in the current century, particularly among listeners not based in England. In that context I would suggest that, for those just becoming acquainted with the Ferrier legacy, 20th Century British Treasures is not a particularly good place to start.

As a result, I would recommend that the Centenary Edition is still the best resource for those wishing to listen to the finest audio documents of Ferrier interpretations. Indeed, given that Amazon has options for used copies of this release at reduced prices, the price of this abundant collection has become more reasonable than it was when the album first appeared. The fact is that the best way fo get hooked on Ferrier is to listen to her recordings with conductor Bruno Walter, and the best of those recordings was made in May of 1952 in Vienna with tenor Julius Patzak and Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.