Love and Loss

FS Kelly's moving Elegy for Rupert Brooke and Butterworth's setting of AE Housman are among a rich seam of poetry explored by this set of composers.

A close friend of Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth was killed at the age of 31, during the battle of the Somme as dawn broke on the 5th August 1916. A war hero, he was awarded the Military Cross twice. Butterworth's legacy rests on a handful of pieces, notably his much loved English Idylls and folk-song arrangements. He belongs to a generation of composers who showed great promise early on, only to be denied the chance to reach musical maturity. Over the course of the week, we'll also hear the work of four contemporaries of Butterworth: fellow Englishmen Ernest Farrar and William Denis Browne, the Scottish composer Cecil Coles and the Australian composer Frederick Septimus Kelly. All of them, like Butterworth, died on active service during the Great War. Among the musical gems, there's the first ever recording of Denis Browne's ballet "The Comic Spirit", made for the series by the BBC Philharmonic. Their musical trajectory may be short, but this lost generation of composers nonetheless has made an indelible mark on the face of British music.

Donald Macleod and Dr Kate Kennedy examine why the Elizabethans' attitude to culture, poetry and the arts was much admired by composer W Denis Browne. They also discuss how the outbreak of World War One influenced the kind of poetry that caught popular attention.

W Denis Browne
Diaphenia
Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy
To Gratiana Dancing and Singing
Robin Tritschler, tenor
Malcolm Martineau, piano

Ernest Farrar
Rhapsody No.1: The Open Road
Philharmonia Orchestra
Alasdair Mitchell, conductor

George Butterworth
Six Songs From A Shropshire Lad
Benjamin Luxon, baritone
David Willison, piano

Frederick Kelly
Elegy for Strings "In Memoriam Rupert Brooke"
BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Lloyd-Jones, conductor

George Butterworth
Requiescat
Roderick Williams, baritone
Iain Burnside, piano.