George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad and Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel, natural pastoral partners, have been recorded many times, but never perhaps with such a deep sense of theatricality as this release from two veterans of the operatic stage, the baritone Chris Booth-Jones and the conductor Igor Kennaway, here an exquisitely sensitive accompanist. Booth-Jones brings a bracingly outdoor swagger to the VW collection, underpinned by Kennaway’s masterly playing, while the bittersweet rapture of the Butterworth is nicely balanced by their incisive readings of EJ Moeran’s more modernist Housman setting, Ludlow Town, and Finzi’s Let Us Garlands Bring. Idyllic.
