Richard Lewis sings Tippett and Janacek

mpLIVE will release a series of rare broadcasts made by the tenor Richard Lewis (1914-1990) in the prime of his long career thanks to a generous donation of tapes and funding by his widow, Elizabeth Muir-Lewis. Lewis was unsurpassed among British tenors of the mid-twentieth-century in his willingness and ability to tackle challenging contemporary scores. Between 1953 and 1965 he appeared in the British premières of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, as well as in the world premières of Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, and Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam.

His ringing tone and musical sensivity in even the thorniest passages of these scores can readily be appreciated, alongside his lyric gifts at telling a more intimate story, in these cantatas/song-cycles by Tippett and Janácek – both of whom were still very much ‘new music’ to British audiences when these fine studio recordings were made. Boyhood’s End nostalgically celebrates the abundance of life through the vivid recollections of a South-American childhood by the writer and naturalist W H Hudson (1841-1922). The Heart’s Assurance is a stark reflection on ephemerality and extinction, with a poignant dedication to the memory of Francesca Allinson, a close friend of the composer who had killed herself in 1945, apparently in love with Tippett and unreconciled to there being no possibility of a more intimate relationship with him. Tippett sets poetry by Alun Lewis and Sydney Keyes, two men who had themselves died tragically young during the war. Janacek’s quirky cycle of folk poetry, telling the story of a young man beguiled from his oxen by a mysterious gypsy woman, makes a perfect foil.

mpLIVE will release a series of rare broadcasts made by the tenor Richard Lewis (1914-1990) in the prime of his long career thanks to a generous donation of tapes and funding by his widow, Elizabeth Muir-Lewis. Lewis was unsurpassed among British tenors of the mid-twentieth-century in his willingness and ability to tackle challenging contemporary scores. Between 1953 and 1965 he appeared in the British premières of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, as well as in the world premières of Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, and Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam.

His ringing tone and musical sensivity in even the thorniest passages of these scores can readily be appreciated, alongside his lyric gifts at telling a more intimate story, in these cantatas/song-cycles by Tippett and Janácek – both of whom were still very much ‘new music’ to British audiences when these fine studio recordings were made. Boyhood’s End nostalgically celebrates the abundance of life through the vivid recollections of a South-American childhood by the writer and naturalist W H Hudson (1841-1922). The Heart’s Assurance is a stark reflection on ephemerality and extinction, with a poignant dedication to the memory of Francesca Allinson, a close friend of the composer who had killed herself in 1945, apparently in love with Tippett and unreconciled to there being no possibility of a more intimate relationship with him. Tippett sets poetry by Alun Lewis and Sydney Keyes, two men who had themselves died tragically young during the war. Janacek’s quirky cycle of folk poetry, telling the story of a young man beguiled from his oxen by a mysterious gypsy woman, makes a perfect foil.

Richard Lewis sings Tippett and Janacek

Maureen Forrester

Ernest Lush

Frederick Stone

Richard Lewis

BBC Singers

BBC Studios, London

Vocal & Song

SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT

Boyhood's End

The Heart's Assurance

LEOS JANACEK

Diary of a Man who Disappeared