JOHN GARDNER (b.1917): Six by Four, ARTHUR BUTTERWORTH (b.1923): Ancient Sorceries, JOHN JOUBERT (b.1927): Crabbed Age, RICHARD STEINITZ (b.1938): Hymn to Apollo at Delphi, JOHN MCCABE (b.1938): 2 Latin Elegies, NICHOLAS MARSHALL (b.1942): Cat & Mouse, STEPHEN HOUGH (b.1961): 3 Grave Songs.

Description: Our second 20th century English recorder disc this month, this time songs for countertenor, recorder(s), cello and harpsichord. Needless to say, they're all tonal but the texts cover 2100 years of history: the longest is Steinitz' 10-minute Hymn to Apollo from 1976 which sets the earliest surviving unambiguously notated music (from Delphi in the second cen. BC). Butterworth sets de la Mare, pianist Hough uses Wilde, Ernest Dowson and Hardy, Marshall six poems by Ted Hughes, McCabe goes back two millenia again for Catullus and a later anonymous Latin hymn for Compline, Gardner's half-dozen are all from Shakespeare while Joubert's five-song set (written in 1974 for David Munrow's Early Music Consort of London) has one Shakespeare sonnet and four other 16th century poems. No texts (!) except the translated Greek and the two Latin ones. Nicholas Clapton (countertenor), John Turner (recorder), Jonathan Price (cello), Ian Thompson (harpsichord).