Complete songs for voice and piano (Vol 1)

"Here's another fresh slant on Elgar's masterly Sea Pictures, this time a most persuasive first recording employing a male voice. With exemplary diction, poise and focused tone, Konrad Jamot forges an instinctive alliance with the admirable Reinild Mees, who accompanies with stylish understanding. Both sound and presentation are absolutely first-rate." (Gramophone April 2008)

"This is a really pleasant recital that easily encourages repeated listening...Highlights include Sea Pictures--sung with authority and proper dramatic flair by baritone Konrad Jarnot--and the characterful, artful performances by soprano Amanda Roocroft in In the Moonlight and The Wind at Dawn. Both of these singers manage to deliver even the more parlor-ish songs in a manner that captures the music's essential emotional aspects and melodic features... It helps that the voices are so appealing, strong, and technically assured, with ideal timbre and character for this music...Highly recommended!"
(ClassicsToday)

Like most composers, Sir Edward Elgar's first attempts at composition were with anthems and small chamber and piano pieces, though unlike most young composers of his day, strangely Elgar wrote few songs until his various love affairs from his mid-twenties onwards. Elgar's early life as a composer was one of constantly importuning publishers to take small pieces - a situation that gradually changed in the 1890s as his early works for chorus and orchestra appeared. But it took Elgar a long time to become established, the Enigma Variations only appearing when he was 41. It is doubly interesting then to encounter so early a song as his setting of Edmund Waller, The Self-Banished, which dated from 1875 when he was just 18. It, of course, remained unpublished and unknown until recently when it was printed in the Elgar Collected Edition. In the present selection of Elgar's songs we move on a dozen years for something more familiar, when the thirty-year old Elgar set Queen Mary's Song, words by Tennyson. Written in June and July 1887 it was accepted by the London publishers Osborn & Tuckwood and revised for publication in 1889. It later became familiar when included by Elgar in the volume of Seven Lieder which the now celebrated composer published in 1907. In The Wind at Dawn the 30 year-old Elgar set words written by his future wife, ('C. Alice Roberts' it says on the printed copies), about a year before they were married. Alice was already a published poet and novelist, if a minor one. It was the first time he had set Alice's verse. However, the music's tremendous character and impact was not fully revealed until he orchestrated it, in his most sumptuous mature manner, in July 1912. Here we have nothing less than what is, to all intents and purposes, a sixth Sea Picture.