Fiona Maddocks 

Quilter: The Complete Songbook Volume 2 review – full of pleasures

Mark Stone and Stephen Barlow make a persuasive case for Quilter's wistful songs, writes Fiona Maddocks
  
  


This second of four discs will be the first complete recording of the songs of Roger Quilter (1877-1953). As well as setting Blake, Byron, Keats, Binyon and the Earl of Rochester, the Sussex-born composer also wrote some of his own texts, sometimes using a pseudonym. The mood of these songs is wistful, fairly conventional and often with intricate piano parts, elegantly played by Stephen Barlow. Mark Stone's performances are assured and persuasive. A sensitive Old Etonian, of frail physical and mental health, Quilter's talent tends to be dismissed as "English Edwardian", though he lived until 1953. You'd have to be a serious devotee to need the full collection, but this Volume 2 is full of pleasures, not least the song cycle To Julia, to poems of Robert Herrick.

 

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