Gurney: Severn Meadows and Other Songs
price, artists, videos & extracts, reviews & critiques, news & interviews, goodies...

Gurney: Severn Meadows and Other Songs is an admirable addition to Hyperion's previous championing of the haunting, haunted songs of Ivor Gurney, quantities of them written during his long, slow descent into insanity after the Great War. The measured, introspective tone of so many requires effort and involvement from the listener--which is the case from the outset here with the moving "Epitaph in Old Mode". Love, death, nostalgia, the aching beauty of the rural scene--the poetic subject matter is familiar enough, yes, but coloured so distinctively when passed through the prism of Gurney's intense passion and made the more poignant as some of these songs were written in the trenches. There...