Listen & tracks

7 works

A Shropshire LadGeorge Butterworth 6 movements
1. 1 Loveliest of Trees
2. 2 When I was One and Twenty
3. 3 Look not in my eyes
4. 4 Think no more, lad
5. 5 The lads in their hundreds
6. 6 Is my team ploughing?
Songs of TravelRalph Vaughan Williams 9 movements
1. 7 The Vagabond
2. 8 Let Beauty awake
3. 9 The Roadside Fire
4. 10 Youth and Love
5. 11 In Dreams
6. 12 The infinite Shining Heavens
7. 13 Whither must I wander?
8. 14 Bright is the Ring of Words
9. 15 I have trod the upward and the downward slope
The Hums of PoohHarold Fraser-Simpson 8 movements
1. 16 Isn't it Funny
2. 17 How sweet to be a Cloud
3. 18 Cottleston Pie
4. 19 The Cheers for Pooh
5. 20 The more it snows
6. 21 I lay on my chest
7. 22 Here lies a tree
8. 23 Christopher Robin is going
24 Sea Fever John Ireland
25 Now sleeps the crimson petal Roger Quilter
26 The Foggy, Foggy Dew Benjamin Britten
27 I Heard You Singing Eric Coates

Accompanied by David McSkimming, Morton presents Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad, Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, Fraser-Simson's settings of A. A. Milne in The Hums of Pooh, and songs by Ireland, Quilter, Britten and Coates.

The recital takes its title from Eric Coates's I Heard You Singing, and its subtitle from the songs Morton absorbed at home while his father returned to the Lieder and English repertoire he had loved at university.

In the artist’s words

Dad took us camping to remote places where he would set up camp for us and then disappear during the daylight hours. Naturally, I thought these places were chosen to provide the best possible holidays. In fact, they were the homes of the rare species of butterflies that he loved to collect. My sister and I loved him to read to us: The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books. Sometimes we’d play cricket. These were the best times. Or nearly the best. Occasionally, Dad would come swimming. That was the best. He played an excellent shark. He was funny at the pool; he has very delicate English feet and never walks barefoot.

My final year of school, we bought a new house. It was a renovator’s delight. I chose the smallest room in the house, as it overlooked the garden. Mum is very good with gardens and I knew that when it stopped being a bomb site it would look a picture. The room was adjacent to the family room which housed the piano. This was the year Dad decided to get back into the German Lieder and English art song that he had loved at university. So I learnt many new songs while I studied chemistry and maths.

Dad set me an example of intelligence, gentility, humour, patience, humility and kindness. He now lives in the country and loves to read, cook and retreat to the room affectionately named 'the buggery', where he sorts, sets and stores his bugs (mainly lepidoptera).

— Jonathan Morton

Reviews

His singing is wonderful and I can highly recommend the disc which I am certain would have widespread appeal.

— Inge Southcott, Music Forum Magazine

Artists

Jonathan Morton

baritone

Jonathan Morton has a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, is an IT whiz and plays the didgeridoo. He performed with the VSO from 1988 and is a founding member of Pot-Pourri.

David McSkimming

piano

David McSkimming is one of Australia's finest accompanists. He has given recitals with many of the country's most distinguished musicians, and in October 1998, as part of the Melbourne Festival, David McSkimming was the associate artist in recitals with the renowned Korean soprano Sumi Jo and American tenor Gary Lakes.

Benjamin Britten

composer

Edward Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. His operas are firmly established in the international repertoire, and more of them are played worldwide than those of any other composer born in the twentieth century.

George Butterworth

composer

George Butterworth (1885–1916) was an English composer best known for his song settings from A Shropshire Lad and the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow.

John Masefield

composer

Kenneth Leighton (2 October 1929 - August 24, 1988) was an English composer and pianist. His compositions include Anglican church music, pieces for choir and piano, concertos, symphonies, chamber music and an opera. He wrote a well-known setting of the Coventry Carol. He was Reid Professor of Music in Edinburgh University.

Roger Quilter

composer

Roger Quilter’s art songs, more than a hundred in number, set Shakespeare, Herrick and Shelley with a clear English lyricism that has kept them in the recital room for generations.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

composer

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was an English composer of nine symphonies, operas, ballets, and a large body of choral and vocal music. Drawing on Tudor polyphony and English folk-song, he helped free British music from its nineteenth-century German models.

H. R. Bennett

composer

Eric Coates

composer

Eric Coates wrote English light music of strong melody and colourful orchestration: suites and marches with foot-tapping rhythm, waltzes such as By the Sleepy Lagoon, and ballads that still appear in song recitals.

Harold Fraser-Simpson

composer

Alfred Edward Housman

composer

Alfred Edward Housman's A Shropshire Lad gave English song its most durable pastoral texts: spare, fatalistic lyrics of youth, death and an idealised countryside that composers keep returning to for cycles of art song.

John Ireland

composer

John Ireland wrote English art songs, piano miniatures and sacred choral music in a personal Impressionist vein, closer to Debussy and Ravel than to the folk-song school. His hymn Love Unknown and the carol The Holy Boy remain widely sung.

A. A. Milne

composer

A. A. Milne (1882–1956) was an English writer best known for the Winnie-the-Pooh books and for children’s verse that later entered the song repertoire.

Robert Louis Stevenson

composer

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

composer

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was an English poet and Poet Laureate whose verse has long been set to music. His lyrics remain among the most frequently chosen texts in the English art-song and choral repertory.