Customer Reviews

A.E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad, Complete in verse and song

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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.