Welshman Bryn Terfel has chosen a program rich in British song, much of it better known in his country than in ours. Ireland, Quilter, and Vaughan Williams were contemporaries who dominated the setting of British poetry during the first half of the 20th century. Their songs are juxtaposed with lieder from a century earlier by three of the German music world’s giants: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. Specifically, we have the opportunity to experience side-by-side how Quilter and Schubert (in German translation) responded to Shakespeare’s song poetry.

A theme of mortality also runs through this program. Brahms’s magnificent Vier ernste Gesänge constituted his last published work. At the time he wrote these songs, he was mourning the loss of Clara Schumann and was beginning to succumb to cancer. Vaughan Williams was a young man when he composed his Songs of Travel after poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, who already knew his life would be short. Both works have the feeling of a valedictory.