This review is written by Dai Woosnam, daigress@hotmail.com, 6/04
Before I start this review, I ought to relate how it was I came to have this copy in my CD player right now.
Normally, it is a straightforward matter of a review copy arriving at
my door, often from Left Field. Not so here
though.This was a case of ME hunting out the album: so eager was
I to review it.
And here’s how it came about. I was listening to BBC
Radio 3 in the early Spring of 2004 and I caught a radio
programme. One that brought me greater
delight than just about any Folk programme I can ever
remember.
It was entitled “The Lark in The Morning” and was an hour-long concert
by Vivien Ellis and Giles Lewin (who make up the British-based duo,
Alva) at the previous summer’s York Early Music
Festival. I have not been so moved by a Folk
programme in years. I found it quite absorbing.
But if you tell someone that what you were hearing presented was
amongst the classic Top 20 songs of the English Folk Tradition, they’d
probably say, “so what?” But, if you told
them that, you would be telling them just HALF the story.
Vivien Ellis is a singer with a sweet, pure, ENCHANTING voice that
never resorts to mannerisms. No affectation. Pitch
perfect. Singing these songs to Giles’s spare - but telling
accompaniment. (Giles too can also handle a
lyric.) Above all, she has the most wondrous diction
one could imagine. But that in itself is not
what made this programme special.
The real factor that made it so memorable was her introductions.
Before every song, Ms. Ellis spoke for a couple of minutes on the song
to come. A bit like going to an A.L. Lloyd
lecture. Songs that we had taken for granted
all our lives, she FRAMED for us and put the song into the whole
picture. I guess that this was in part due to the fact that
many of her audience there at the York Early Music Festival might
well have been keen exponents of “music for the sackbut” and such
like, but perhaps did not know their way around a traditional ballad.
But even me (who regards himself as reasonably well-frequented with all
the songs Alva delivered) found I could really benefit from her sincere
and touching introductions. How fascinating to be reminded
that Vaughan Williams’s famous cycle ride to the village of Ingrave in
Essex took place almost exactly 100 years before this
concert! And then to hear Vivien beautifully sing the
first of the songs that blew his cycle-clips off that
day. And she pointed out that before he took
that fateful bicycle ride, he had not actually HEARD any source
singers, nor indeed ANYONE in the field singing even ONE of these
traditional songs, despite the fact that he was lecturing about them!
She reminded us that Vaughan Williams had given a lecture in Chelmsford
in Essex that was attended by the two spinster daughters of the Vicar
of Ingrave. After the lecture, they told him
that he should come to tea at the vicarage, because they would then
arrange to have some villagers present who would sing him some of the
very songs he was lecturing about! And when he eventually
cycled there, the first song “Bushes and Briars” was sung by
74-year-old labourer, Charles Potiphar. The
31-year old Ralph Vaughan Williams was hooked. And the
rest, as they say, is HISTORY.
But no, not quite “history”. By some magic, Ellis not
only made it immediately belong to NOW, but aided by the brilliant
introduction, pulled off the trick of singing it like SHE was Potiphar
and the audience was RVW … which in a sense I am sure many of them were
(i.e. like him, hearing it for the first time).
And so the wonderful concert continued. And I
thought: BBC Radio 3 is where Lord Lucan is living, as far as many
Folkies are concerned (though not the cognoscenti, I hasten to
add!). Surely, this is the very concert and I
mean the total thing, including the introductions that folk clubs
and festivals the length and breadth of the land should be booking,
instead of occasionally hiring those singer-songwriters whose
desperately inept lyrics beggar
belief. So note that name, ALVA,
you bookers out there.
Truly fine.
And thus that is the history behind my decision to hunt down this album.
And so, “get my hands” on a copy of the CD, I did. The CD of course contains the songs used in that programme: songs I
have referred to above.
They are of course songs that need no description from me: just study
the track list below and, if you are a student of the British Folk
Tradition, then most of the songs will already be firmly ensconced in
your memory.
The CD not unexpectedly - proved to be an unalloyed
DELIGHT. I have insufficient superlatives in my
lexicon to describe it. In contrast to the radio
programme, here Vivien’s hurdy-gurdy plays a significant
part.
From the getgo. This scandalously
neglected instrument provides a magnificently brooding presence from
the very start of that hypnotic and mysterious 16th century Corpus
Christi carol “The Bells of Paradise”. And one was
hooked. A bit like with a great
book. This was the CD equivalent to a “REAL
PAGE-TURNER”. I could not put it down …or rather,
TURN IT OFF.
However, let me sober up here. I
am, after all, writing this in the role of an impartial
critic. (Or at least, I certainly SHOULD
be.) And thus, in the
interests of writing an “objective review”, rather than a “gushing fan
letter”, I should perhaps slightly bemoan the fact that the album does
not contain Vivien’s glorious spoken introductions to every
song! Instead we have to make do with an informative
and well-presented liner booklet.
Maybe next album, we can have her spoken voice introducing every track?
Ha! Who knows, it might start a fashion!
Wherever you are in the world, you can get this wonderful album by mail
order fromwww.bejo.co.uk (e-mail toinfo@bejo.co.uk)
Dai Woosnam
Grimsby, England
daigress@hotmail.com
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