A.E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad, Complete in verse and song [Import, Original recording reissued]

Alan Bates (Artist), Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Artist), Graham Johnson (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (December 11, 2001)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Import, Original recording reissued
• Label: Hyperion UK
• ASIN: B00005S85Q
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #277,283 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant. Beautifully done., May 30, 2010

By 

John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A.E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad, Complete in verse and song (Audio CD)

Brilliant. Beautifully done. Housman's Shropshire Lad has remained a mainstay of English-speaking culture for nearly a century. Certainly no one of my mother's generation and before had failed to commit "When I Was One and Twenty," or "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" or "To an Athlete Dying Young" to memory. That these poems have a context in a masterful cycle and that the cycle is so eminently approachable by the common reader is a joy that, I hope, most lovers of poetry discover, if not on their own then certainly here. Meanwhile, Anthony Rolfe Johnson (a crystaline English tenor) and Graham Johnson (pianist; are they related?) sing songs culled from several extraordinary art-song composers who have been attracted to the cycle. These settings are further enhanced with readings of the un-set poems by the actor Alan Bates, making for a pleasant give-and-take in the presentation. The resulting mixture is a two-hour diversion that gives the listener a strong sense of the larger structure of A Shorpshire Lad as a whole: the satisfying arc of it, the diversions, the pre-Boer War, pre-WW I darkness of it, suffused in an unrelenting sense of loss of friends and friendship and, as it turns out, of love.