There Is Sweet Music is the idyllic title of the first AVIE release by the eight-voice Proteus Ensemble and their conductor Stephen Shellard, which surveys a selection of relatively rare part-songs by Sir Edward Elgar.
Elgar maintained his dedication to composing part-songs throughout his life and imbued each of them with an inimitable character. Like the composer's celebrated Enigma Variations, his part-songs bear an array of inspirations and dedicatees, including his wife Caroline Alice who penned the poem of the album's closer, O Happy Eyes, shortly after she and Elgar were married. This early work became a companion to the song Love, written eight years later and also dedicated to Caroline Alice. Elgar turned to famous poets and peers - Lord Byron for Deep in my soul, Percy Bysshe Shelley for O wild West Wind!, and Alfred Lord Tennyson whose poem The Lotos-Eaters provides the album's title track. English translations of Russian poems lend themselves to Death on the Hills, Love's Tempest and Serenade. Elgar frequently found inspiration in Italy, where he composed Angelus', a song dedicated to his close friend Alice Stuart Wortley whom he called Windflower and whose spirit is enshrined in his Violin Concerto. Stephen Shellard's Elgarian epiphany began in 1990 when he joined Dr. Donald Hunt's choir at Worcester Cathedral as an Alto Lay Clerk. Dr. Hunt's inspired and devoted expertise in performances of works by Worcester's most famous musical son cast a life-long spell on Stephen that manifests itself in these beautiful performances with his Proteus Ensemble.
'Beautifully recorded in Pershore Abbey under the watchful supervision of producer Andrew Keener, there are splendidly alert and sympathetic performances from the Proteus Ensemble' � Gramophone
Featured on BBC 3's Record Review on 9th November: 'The album is the fruit of Stephen Shellard's long-standing enthusiasm for the music, and part of what is so exciting about it. [�] This is definitely not background music.'
'Shellard shows meticulous attentions to detail, with superb control over the ebb and flow of rubato and rapidly shifting dynamics in Elgar's music.' � BBC Music Magazine (4 stars)
