Ralph Vaughan Williams Rise,Heart

Five Mystical Songs (1911); When I am Dead, My Dearest (1903); Dreamland (1905); Eight Folk Songs (arr. Roderick Williams); Willow Wood (1903, rev 1908)

Roderick Williams (baritone); Wiliam Vann (piano); Sacconi Quartet; Levi Andreassen (double bass)

Albion Records ALBCD070

There are record labels with vast catalogues and deep pockets, and then there is Albion Records — a small, specialist outfit with a single composer at its heart, which has quietly become one of the most indispensable names in British music recording.

Founded under the auspices of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, the label has built a catalogue that consistently rescues, restores and reilluminates corners of the RVW repertoire that the bigger labels have long overlooked. Rise, Heart is another exemplary addition to that enterprise and one of the most rewarding Vaughan Williams discs of recent memory.

The premise is characteristically thoughtful: every track here is a first recording of the work in the version presented. At its centre stands the Five Mystical Songs, those luminous settings of George Herbert first heard in 1911, given in Vaughan Williams's own arrangement for voice, piano and string quintet, made around 1925 and seldom performed. It is a version that suits the music uncommonly well. The textures are lithe and transparent, the intimacy of chamber forces lending an inwardness that the full orchestral version sometimes mutes. Roderick Williams is in characteristically distinguished form. His lyrical baritone, its diction unforced and immaculate, shapes Herbert's verse with an understanding that feels lived-in rather than studied. Easter has a quickening joy; I Got Me Flowers is phrased with real tenderness; and Love Bade Me Welcome is held in that stillness, which is Williams's particular gift.

The Sacconi Quartet — in its twenty-fifth year and still with its founding personnel intact — plays with the sensitivity one expects from an ensemble of this standing, while William Vann's pianism, as ever, is a model of supportive intelligence. The closing Antiphon is where curiosity turns to revelation: without choir or organ, and with the American prize-winner Levi Andreassen's double bass lending grounding weight, Vaughan Williams's own arrangement makes an entirely persuasive case for itself. One had not expected to be so convinced.

The two Christina Rossetti settings from 1903 and 1905 – When I am dead, my dearest and Dreamland – are here given their first recordings by a male voice, earlier accounts having been the preserve of sopranos. Williams finds in Dreamland a mood of hushed, suspended grace and in the Rossetti songs generally a quiet melancholy that sits naturally in his register. The eight folksong arrangements, transcribed by Roderick Williams himself from Vaughan Williams's originals for the string quartet medium, are a delight. The transcriptions breathe; they feel inevitable rather than contrived, and Sacconi's playing has just the right balance of rusticity and refinement.

The disc is rounded off by Willow Wood, the fifteen-minute cantata on sonnets from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life, first performed in March 1903 and closely bound up with the better-known song cycle. Williams recorded the orchestral version for Naxos in 2005; here he returns to the work in its original guise for voice and piano. John Francis's scholarly note traces the piece's genesis with care – an idea that came to the composer "in the Quantocks" and grew from song into "Vocal Scena" and finally into cantata. In this stripped-back form, the writing's ardour and its debt to Wagner feel more nakedly exposed, and Williams and Vann respond with a sense of sustained dramatic focus.

The recording, made at St George's, Headstone, in July 2025 by Andrew Walton and Tim Burton of K&A Productions, is handsomely engineered. The acoustic is warm without blurring detail, and the balance between voice and instruments is judicious throughout.

That Albion Records continues to produce discs of this quality, with this level of scholarly and artistic care, remains a quiet marvel of the British recording scene. Rise, Heart is another example of a small label punching considerably above its weight — and another reminder that the Vaughan Williams we think we know still has much to disclose.