When recording Lied (voice and piano) repertoire, the magic starts with finding the right voices and personalities to pair up with. It is highly unusual to record a song cycle with multiple singers, but in this case, the magic multiplied! In March 2024 I had the great honor to work with the Voces8 Scholars once again to rehearse and record Ralph Vaughan Williams song cycle ‘Songs of Travel’ at the Voces8 Centre in London.

‘Songs of Travel’ is often described as the Englisch ‘Winterreise’. Both have in common the theme of a traveller, but other than that there are not too many similarities between the two. Where ‘Winterreise’ is dark, bordering on the insane, ‘Songs of Travel’ features a traveller that went through highs and lows in his life but ultimately finds his peace. The range of emotions in the various songs of the cycle is much wider and much more intense. Where ‘Winterreise’ starts with a dark moment (the traveller leaving his home town after his love having cancelled their engagement) and is only growing even darker from there, even occasional memories of happier times being shaded by that opening event, the traveller in ‘Songs of Travel’ shares memories of true love and sheer overwhelming beauty with us in stark contrast to those dark memories that also exist in other songs.

Working with eight different singers allowed us to use their different timbres to intensify the contrast between the songs. Each of them are very talented young singers, each of them have very different voices and styles, and each of them manages to bring out the particular narrative of their song using their individual characteristics. At the same time, their experience of singing as one vocal ensemble ensures that the result is still one song cycle and not a collection of individual songs.

For me as a pianist, studying the ‘Songs of Travel’ has been a lot of fun and a lot of learning. It becomes obvious quickly that Vaughan Williams is not one of those pianist-composers that write not only for the instrument but also for the player, with the knowledge of what is naturally possible to perform at the instrument. Vaughan Williams’ piano parts are gorgeous, he is truly treating the piano as an equal partner to the singer and is using the range and registers of the instrument wonderfully to help narrate the story. But in doing so, he does write passages that are very hard to actually perform (some are outright scary!), and it has been a nice challenge to get these sorted and polished to perfection.

We are proud to share this recording with you shortly! Tune in to Live from London 2024 at https://www.livefromlondon.org/summer24-voces8scholars – the broadcast starts on August 10th.