George Butterworth died on the western front on 5 August 1916, a month into the Somme offensive. He was 31, and though he had not composed anything since enlisting at the outbreak of war in 1914, he was already regarded as one of the outstanding young talents in British music.
This disc collects together everything that survives of Butterworth’s orchestral music, bulking it out with further arrangements by conductor Kriss Russman. While the orchestrations of the Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, sung with typical care and sensitivity by James Rutherford, don’t diminish the music in the way that the Finzi arrangements on the Aurora Orchestra’s recent disc traduced that composer, they still tend to overegg the already exquisite original piano versions.
Russman’s completion of the Orchestral Fantasia that Butterworth left as a 92-bar torso when he went off to war is more worthwhile, though, even haunting in its way, and his eight-minute version is far more convincing than the 17-minute one performed at the English Music festival last year. Butterworth’s two best-known works, the idyll The Banks of Green Willow, and the rhapsody A Shropshire Lad, receive decent, if not truly memorable performances, though this isn’t quite the centenary tribute one hoped it would be.
